The comment inside the google docs was made by me, I was not trolling you on purpose I thought your writing was literally a test for me and I had little time to spare at the time. Most importantly, I simply couldn't figure out how to remove things once they were written. If you are not too spooked I'd like to retry reading it. No comments inside the google docs this time, I will just leave feedback right here if you want to.
What if it actually doesn't and their craft are really only limited by how fast their typical UFO-discs can spin without killing the crew inside (apparently they are spongelike inside) since unlike us they already know how to create anti-gravity to pull their ships forward? In that case the reason we are not dead yet is because they needed to figure out how to construct fast enough motherships capable of a full-scale earth invasion after we apparently killed most of their messengers. In that case our strategy should be to pool resources into defending...
A good example of the proposed mechanism at work can probably be seen in the variety of psychosomatic symptoms experienced and reported by soldiers who fought in the first world war (Often diagnosed as "shell shock", "male hysteria", or "war neurosis"). Symptoms included hysterical blindness, deafness, becoming mute, even paralyzed limbs without any apparent cause were a thing.
Also, the "thousand yard stare" seems to be explainable by a similar mechanism: The module producing conscious experience seemingly "deta...
Agreed. I would further claim most sellers are not actually aware that they are just selling the representation.
The plain but known and studied "secret" to happiness is to adjust your expectations, refrain from unfavorable social comparisons and keep a gratitude journal or write gratitude letters to people (whether you choose to send them or not), which no ever one does. In my case watching a lot of nature and history documentaries on BBC and being aware on how everyone and everything tends to have a life a lot shittier than me helps keeping trac...
As someone who worked with online marketing services like google AdWords, facebook ads and search engine optimization, I can absolutely assue you that your statement is not generally true. Advertising is definitely not a terrible waste of resources, but you are right insofar that it CAN be. However, if the basic conditions are right (product and price makes sense, website looks attractive and is easily navigable etc.) ads can be amazing and increase your sales by several 1000%. I've had customers that made a return of roughly 100€ for every 3€ invest...
The obvious question is how is it even possible that Wikipedia works at all? If Wikipedia didn't exist in our universe, we would now be tempted walk away from this with a high probability estimate that this concept is simply impossible to pull off due to the various reasons mentioned, yet here we live in a world where Wikipedia is clear evidence to the contrary, and to my knowledge it suffers from many problems you and Qiaochu_Yuan mentioned above. Are we to conclude then, that the sequential nature of the arbital content is the crux here?
As we all k...
Post-hoc analysis -- Wikipedia relies on a relatively small number of people who have the unusual motives/dispositions necessary to write for it, so it doesn't have to cater to the masses or even the typical elite. However, that doesn't explain how enough people got interested in the first place. Maybe it had to do with there being fewer alternative venues back then. Also, I'm not so familiar with the history, but I am guessing it grew out of a fairly vibrant community of wiki users. Arbital, on the other hand, tried to bootstrap in relative isolation. (Sadly the vibrant community of LWers didn't serve the same function, likely because the use-case for Arbital 1.0 was too different from the use-case for LW.)
Wikipedia can often trigger a "this is wrong on the internet" reflex that gets people involved.
Yeah, I don't really understand how Wikipedia got to where it is today. I think it is mostly edited by people very different from me; if I had to take a wild stab, much more autistic (and bless them for that, to be clear).
I love the concept, very useful for one's own mental hygene to notice slipping into a justification mindset and I expect if you manage to put it to regular use in social situations, it can really become the equivalent of some oil on the gears of tedious and annoying conversation.
I sometimes have to deal with people who are always late and never ever get anything done on time or as promised, possibly due to procrastination, and their instinct is to justify it because it seems that their entire strategy of getting through life is built around the conc...
So basically it's just saying something is "not great but everything else is even worse" in a somewhat ethnically incorrect way? Don't think I'm sold on becoming a frequent user of the phrase; I predict your mileage will vary with "trigger-happy" crowds, scorning the inherent political incorrectness of the term. Also it's not exactly a super complex thought you are trying to compress here, you are saving like five words at the cost of raised eyebrows and bewilderment. IMO not worth it.
I totally got that part, I'm saying your writing heavily implies the assumption that nerds in general are oblivious to this insight of yours, rather than acting contratian on purpose by semi-conscious calculated choice. I definitely consider myself a member of the nerd spectrum, but I was never blind to these social transactions. If someone talks nonsense that is of the kind that signals group membership there are still many valid reasons to engage in an object-level discussion. I may try to signal to others of the SMART tribe, or even just to that pe...
I've glanced over a few posts of yours recently and I feel your caricature of nerds is quite off, if we mean something even remotely similar by that word. I've rarely met a nerd with that level of clearly autistic (conscious & subconscious) obliviousness to the fact that each message has several sides to it, and that the object-level information side is not all there is to what is going on in social settings. There are tribes and subtribes of smart people out there, who make a big deal of object-level truth but they are all also simultaneousl...
There is a very obvious problem with [1] as well:
" The first strategy involves sending a hypothetical example's equivalent back in time and using the present knowledge of the outcome as a justification for the validity or not of the argument."
It has basically the same problem as any "reasoning by analogy"-type argument. Reality is built from relatively simple components from the ground up and becomes complex quickly the "further up" you go. What you do is take a slice from the middle and compare it to some other slice fro...
2) That depends entirely on the definition of meaning, just as AndHisHorse points out. It's not clear to me what is the most accepted definition of meaning, not even among scientists, let alone laymen.
One could even define meaning as loosely as "a map/representation of something that is depdendant or entangled with reality". Most people seem to use meaning and purpose interchangably. In this case I like purpose better, because then we can ask "what is the purpose of this hammer" and there is a reasonable answer to it that we all kn...
I thought a bit about whether or not the existence of such as-of-yet unfelt feelings is plausible and believe I came up with one real-life example:
Depending on whether or not one is willing to qualify the following as a feeling or an emotion, feeling truly and completely anonymous may be one of those feelings that was not "fully" realizable for generations in the past, but is now possible thanks to the internet. The most immersive example of that weird experience of anonymity as of yet may be something like VRchat, which incidentally seems to lead to some rather peculiar behaviors, (e.g. look for some "VRchat uganda knuckles" videos on youtube).
Great review and summary in one! I especially liked the scorecard section in the end as a quick recap. The issues you had with the content of the book were well-founded and you explained your gripes with them well enough to make me nod in agreement. I especially buy your general "in addition to" argument.
Only thing I'd like to add is the following general insight:
In your scorecard section you write:
Ranked from most about Y to least about Y:
Food isn’t about Nutrition
[...]
I've worked in sales for websites and ads before and similar to yo...
If you can articulate and better define what the actual handful core insights are that you hope to transmit maybe you or someone else here can pinpoint better literature for what you are looking for.
It seems to me Eliezer's "Probability is in the Mind" post may include at least in part of what you are looking for. Maybe you can slightly edit and streamline it for the purpose of making it more approachable to your audience.
Highlights from that post:
Quote #1
Jaynes was of the opinion that probabilities were in the mind, not in the environment—...
Many years ago I was in the situation of having to learn stats for my B.Sc. in Psychology. Up until that point I've always been crap at math and great at everything else in school.
What made stats and to some extent math finally click for me and eventually made me pretty decent at stats was understanding what a formal language actually is by reading Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid.
Now I wouldn't recommend the book itself, because it's extremely dense, I'm just saying assume that people don't understand what a formal lan...
There may be one more core idea that is obvious to us now but seemingly wasn't very common in many societies: Things might actually get better and the world is not about to end soon.
Most religions have the basic arc of a story: there is a beginning, there is an ending and lots of BS sandwiched in the middle. Since most civilizations didn't realize how old the earth actually is, the apocalyptic ending part of the religious story was usually projected just a few hundred years out, especially by the dominant monotheistic civilizations during the la...
Regarding the wheel
I don't find it mysterious at all why wheels took "so long". I'd expect the wheel to be conceptually discovered much earlier then it's first usage, because to be actually useful in the real world a wheel requires roads or vast flat plains to outperform using a backpack, let alone simply loading the animal with sacks in case your civilization figured out animal husbandry of at least one animal useful for transporting.
Regarding printing
I was always a lot more surprised by how long the Gutenberg-type printing press ...
The situation in Sweden is rather similar.
However, in case you plan to do a psychological study in Sweden don't just factor in time and nerves, also be ready to pay up:
https://www.epn.se/media/1207/application_form__translated_.pdf
Page one says "merely processing personal data" will cost you 5000 kr (~610 US$). Other options on the menu may incur higher fees for wasting the Ethical Review Boards' precious time. What exactly is personal data you ask?
Ethical Review Act:
https://www.epn.se/media/2348/the_ethical_review_act.pdf
Section 3
This...
Just out of curiosity: How probable do you think any SETI-contact will turn out to be AI-initiated as opposed to biological (in the broadest possible sense of that word)?