All of GDC3's Comments + Replies

Upvoted without reading for the trigger warning. Maybe I'll read it later: I suppose if it hate the article I might change my vote, but probably not. Sometimes it's in one's best interests to be a single issue voter.

Interesting. I'm familiar with the "This taks is too nebulous-what am I even doing?" but it isn't a source of procrastination for me exactly. Usually it's a cause of spending well over 25 minutes stuck in thought loops trying to figure out what to do, and what I actually need to do is talk it through with somebody or at least think out loud.

"A few minutes of browsing won't matter" matches procrastination for me, but even your short comment suggests a different context for the quoted phrase than I experience. For me "A few minute... (read more)

I feel like this comes close to the definite proof that I should stop paying attention to articles about procrastination on less wrong, because you are all talking about a completely different problem than I have. (Plausible because I'm definitely neurologically weird.)

But just in case: can somebody explain to me how this isn't completely circular? If I knew how to implement the instruction "Work on one thing for that 25 minutes, nothing else." as an atomic action, I wouldn't have a procrastination problem. I notice that I'm confused and I'm not sure that I know what the word "procrastination" commonly refers to anymore.

I'm aware of the opposite problem and I try to avoid being desensitized too. But it seems to me that city people frequently actively lie to themselves and each other in order to be willing to eat meat. I'm willing to give examples if you don't know what I'm talking about.

I avoid meat (not vegetarian, just eat as little as I conveniently can) because of what I and my friends call the Stuffed-Animal-Principle. The idea is that it's bad utility function maintenance to allow stuffed animals to be abused. (Stanford burned teddy bears in the pre big game rally.) The idea is that stuffed animals are basically a technological superstimulus for empathy and you risk damage to your actual utility function by desensitizing yourself to that. (I don't have actual studies on the specific fact, but it makes sense with things that are ... (read more)

Related worry that I've been meaning to ask about for a while:

Given that is there is still plenty of controversy over which types of unusual human minds to consider "pathological" instead of just rare variants, how is MIRI planning to decide which ones are included in CEV? My skin in the game: I'm one of the Autistic Spectrum people who feel like "curing my autism" would make me into a different person who I don't care about. I'm still transhumanist; I still want intelligence enhancements, external boosts to my executive function and ... (read more)

I put sometimes.

I believe all kinds of crazy stuff and question everything when I'm lying in bed trying to fall asleep, most commonly that death will be an active and specific nothing that I will exist to experience and be bored frightened and upset by forever. Something deep in my brain believes a very specific horrible cosmology as wacky and specific as any religion but not nearly as cheerful. When my faculties are weakened it feels as if I directly know it to be true and any attempt to rehearse my reasons for materialism feels like rationalizing.

I'm neither very mentally healthy nor very neurotypical, which may be part of why this happens.

In my case the usual reason they're demotivating is that I usually know that they think I can do it; they're just spelling out their model of me. Usually the model of me is so bad that I'm led to further discount their opinion, but they're signaling that they care which makes them more likely to be painfully disappointed in me. Basically those motivation talks are more than one kind of legitimate bad news. I don't need a script to be upset by them, but sometimes scripts make me care more. Childhood is one big lesson that your purpose in life is to impress and entertain adults. It can be very hard to shake.

I took the survey and all the optional questions. I love answering multiple choice questions.

Mechanism is beside the point. Mechanism is just causal nodes in between. Having no mechanism just means there is a direct connection.

It doesn't rule it out. Unless you're directly observing those epiphenominal nodes, Occam's razor heavily decreases the likelihood of such models though, because they make the same predictions with more nodes.

You shouldn't include things we know only by experience as part of our theoretical system, for the purpose of "the human Godel sentence." At best learning a theorem from experience would add an axiom, but then our Godel sentence changes. So if we knew our Godel sentence it would become something else.

You're right. I think the lesson we should take from all this complexity is to remember that the wording of a sentence is relevant to more than just it's truth conditions. Language does a lot more than state facts and ask questions.

As I understand it, the sky does let red-yellow light through. It scatters blue light and lets red light through relatively unchanged. So it looks red-yellow near the light source and blue everywhere else.

When the sky is white, it's not the sky; it's clouds blocking the sky. When the sky is black it's just too dark to see the sky. At least that was my intuition before I knew that the sky wasn't some conventionally blue object. I guess its a question of word usage whether the projective meaning of "blue" which is something like "looks blue under good lighting conditions" should still be applied when it's not caused by reflectance. Though it's not blue from all directions is it?

Specifically they're different because of the pragmatic conversation rule that direct statements should be something your conversation partner will accept, in most normal conversations. You say "X" when you expect your conversation partner to say something like "oh cool, I didn't know that." You say "I believe X" when they may disagree and your arguments will come later or not at all. "It's true that X" is more complicated; one example of use would be after the proposition X has already come up in conversation as ... (read more)

Relatedly, a mathematician friend said that he uses "obvious" to mean "there exists a very short proof of it." He has been sometimes known to say things like "I think this is obvious but I'm not sure why yet."

There's a gap in the proof that X and Y cooperate. You may know how to close it, but if it's possible it's not obvious enough so the extra steps should be added to the article. More importantly, if it can't be closed the theorem might not be true.

The gap: We hypothesize that statement S is provable in (system of X). Therefore X will Cooperate. This guarantees that T is true, by definition, but not that Y will prove that T is true. Presumable Y can recreate the proof of S being true, but it cannot conclude that X will cooperate unless it also can prove... (read more)

I suppose you mean they have different positions. But if indistinguishable particles in quantum mechanics can freely switch places with each other whenever, and which is which has no meaning, then what argument do you have that the universe can even keep different versions of you apart itself?

Not very formal, but I'm trying to convey the idea that certain facts that seem important have no actual meaning in the ontology of quantum physics.

I think you're missing the part where "their points of view" are exactly the same. What would it mean to see more than one of them when they're exactly the same. Are you picturing them lined up next to each other in your field of view so you can count them?

Similarly there is no "I just definitely died" feeling that we know of. (How would we know?) You shouldn't picture "dying and then waking up in another universe." You should picture "I experience passing out knowing I may die, but that there is a least one of me th... (read more)

1 and 2 together are pretty convincing to me. The intuition runs like this: it seems pretty hard to construct anything like an observer without probabilities, so there are only observers in as much as one is looking at the world according to the Born Rule view. So an easy anthropic argument says that we should not be surprised to find ourselves within that interpretation.

Upvoted for successfully correcting my confusion about this example and helping me get updating a little better.

Edit: wow, this was a really old comment reply. How did I just notice it...

I think it's important to try to convert the reason to a consequentialist reason every time actually; it's just that one isn't done at that point, you have to step back and decide if the reason is enough. Like the murder example one needs to avoid dismissing reasons for being in the wrong format.

"I don't want to tell my boyfriend because he should already know" translates to: in the universe in which I tell my boyfriend he learns to rely on me to tell him these things a little more and his chance of doing this sort of thing without my asking dec... (read more)

I have the same 5, except in place of 1 I have something linguistic but not auditory. I can break it down into a stream of "words" in an order but there isn't sound (nor visible words). The stream follows English grammar basically, and the "words" have English parts of speech but do not always correspond easily to English (or any other language I know) words. Sometimes there's a translation but it's not obvious to me, nor do my thoughts slow down thinking of it.

I can usually convert most of these thoughts into words by a paraphrase o... (read more)

What if I have a strong emotional response to the existence of a creature that would make up such a thing as a religion? I suppose it feels more poignant than transcendant, but I've always had strong tender feelings about other peoples religious beliefs.

If the original mistake was never made it would not be referenced as a meme in fiction, but given that it is mightn't I just as well enjoy God as a fictional character or a cultural tradition to reference but not believe?

I agree that hymns to the nonexistence of God are bad, but that's indeed because they'... (read more)

I think that there is a use of the negative emotion of disillusionment that you are missing. When you switch to a more negative belief about a person based on new information for example, simply thinking about them differently in the future is not enough to adjust your emotional relationship to what you now think is appropriate. The time you spent believing the positive lie still counts in their favor instinctually. The pain of disillusion corrects for that.

If Santa isn't real I want to retroactively cancel all of my fondness for him so that my history ... (read more)

Isn't the problem more like: they are ignoring the huge number of bits of evidence that say that cells in fact exist. They aren't comparing between hypotheses that say cells exist. They are comparing the uniform prior for cells existing to a the prior for only random proteins existing. They sound more like they are trying to argue that all our experiences cannot be enough evidence that there are cells, which seems weird.

HI, I'm GDC3. Those are my initials. I'm a little nervous about giving my full name on the internet, especially because my dad is googlible and I'm named after him. (Actually we're both named after my grandfather, hence the 3) But I go by G.D. in real life anyway so its not exactly not my name. I'm primarily working on learning math in advance of returning to college right now.

Sorry if this is TMI but you asked: I became an aspiring rationalist because I was molested as a kid and I knew that something was wrong, but not what it was or how to stop it, a... (read more)