All of Insert_Idionym_Here's Comments + Replies

I think you enormously over-state the difficulty of lying well, as well as the advantages of honesty.

Already done this to myself -- it lowers your self-esteem enormously.

I used to do exactly this, but I created whole backstories and personalities for my "hats" so that they would be more realistic to other people.

It might be more accurate to say that pretty much everything, including what we call biology and physics -- humans are the ones codifying it -- is memetically selected to be learnable by humans. Not that it all develops towards being easier to learn.

May I ask how many people any of you have seen walking around entirely barefoot, as opposed to wearing minimalist footwear of any kind?

To be perfectly honest, at the time I simply planted my face on the table in front of me a few times. I was at a dinner party with friends of my mother's; I would have sounded extremely condescending otherwise.

That is what happened to me.

The lack of this knowledge got me a nice big "most condescending statement of the day award" in lab a year ago.

I have attempted using this in more casual decision making situations, and the response I get is nearly always something along the lines of "Okay, just let me propose this one solution, we won't get attached to it or anything, just hear me out..."

One could attempt to fight that by reducing the number or frequency of M&Ms eaten over a long period of time, essentially weaning one's self off of extrinsic rewards.

I agree. I think that failure mode might then be better avoided by restricting possible "somethings", as opposed to adding another requirement on to one's reasons for wanting to be rational.

If you have "something to protect", if your desire to be rational is driven by something outside of itself, what is the point of having a secret identity? If each student has that something, each student has a reason to learn to be rational -- outside of having their own rationality dojo someday -- and we manage to dodge that particular failure mode. Is having a secret identity a particular way we could guarantee that each rationality instructor has "something to protect"?

But don't you want to understand the underlying principles?

It seems that in order to get Archimedes to make a discovery that won't be widely accepted for hundreds of years, you yourself have to make a discovery that won't be widely accepted for hundreds of years; you have to be just as far in the dark as you want Archimedes to be. So talking about plant rights would probably produce something useful on the other end, but only if what you say is honestly new and difficult to think about. If I wanted Archimedes to discover Bayes' theorem, I would need to put someone on the line who is doing mathematics that is hundreds of years ahead of their time, and hope they have a break-through.

I applaud your fourth paragraph.

I think that perhaps you may be missing the point.

I'm thinking about why I care about why I care about what I'm thinking, and I'm realizing that I have other things that I need to do, and that realization is not helping me get past this moment.

One: I support the above post. I've seen quite a few communities die for that very reason.

Two: Gurren Lagann? (pause) Gurren Lagann? Who the h*ll do you think I am?

I used to live in Ann Arbor, rather recently. I live in Saginaw now.

I believe the point is that we do not know how much more is possible, or what circumstances make that so. As such, we must check, as often as we can, to make absolutely sure that we are still held by our chains.

All of the above.

Feet are for standing, not hands, but that doesn't keep us from admiring the gymnast.

Ah, I see. I just don't think that cryonics significantly improves the chances of actually extending one's life span, which would be similar to saying that democracy is not significantly better than most other political systems.

Are you saying that cryonics is not perfect, but it is the best alternative?

I'm not sure I understand your point. I'll read your link a few more times, just to see if I'm missing something, but I don't quite get it now.

Ah. Wrong referent. It's hilarious for me, and it may, at some point, be hilarious for them. But it's mostly funny for me. That would be why I took time to mention that it was also, in fact, asinine.

I think cryonics is a terrible idea, not because I don't want to preserve my brain until the tech required to recreate it digitally or physically is present, but because I don't think cryonics will do the job well. Cremation does the job very, very badly, like trying to preserve data on a hard drive by melting it down with thermite.

Oh, hello. I've posted a couple of times, in a couple of places, and those of you who have spoken with me probably know that I am one: a novice, and two: a bit of a jerk.

I'm trying to work on that last one.

I think cryonics, in its current form, is a terrible idea, I am a (future) mathematician, and am otherwise divergent from the dominant paradigm here, but I think the rest of that is for me to know, and you to find out.

Bugmaster, I call down hurricanes everyday. It never gets boring. Meteorites are a little harder, but I do those on occasion. They aren't quite as fun.

But the angry frogs?

The angry frogs?

Those don't leave a shattered wasteland behind, so you can just terrorize people over and over again with those. Just wonderful.

Note: All of the above is complete bull-honkey. I want this to be absolutely clear. 100%, fertilizer-grade, bull-honkey.

That's alright. My humor, in real life, is based entirely on the fact that only I know I'm joking at the time, and the other person won't realize it until three days later, when they spontaneously start laughing for no reason they can safely explain. Is that asinine? Yes. Is it hilarious? Hell, yes. So I apologize. I'll try not to do that.

I am being somewhat ... absurd, and on purpose, at that. But I have enough arrogance lying around in my brain to believe that I can trick the super-intelligence.

You aren't doublethinking hard enough, then.

Because the million is already there, along with the thousand. Why not get all of it?

I think it is important to make a distinction between what our choice is now, while we are here, sitting at a computer screen, unconfronted by Omega, and our choice when actually confronted by Omega. When actually confronted by Omega, your choice has been determined. Take both boxes, take all the money. Right now, sitting in your comfy chair? Take the million-dollar box. In the comfy chair, the contra-factual nature of the experiment basically gives you an Outcome Pump. So take the million-dollar box, because if you take the million-dollar box, it's full of a million dollars. But when it actually happens, the situation is different. You aren't in your comfy chair anymore.

How would reality go about being not normal? Or more specifically, what is normal, if not reality?

Thank you very much.

Okay, so where did those arrows come from? I see how the graph second from the top corresponds to the amount of time a particle, were particles to exist, would take if it bounced, if it could bounce, because it's not actually a particle, off of a specific point on the mirror. But how does one pull the arrows out of that graph?

I... Er... What. Where did the whole 'amplitude' thing come from? I mean, it looks a lot like they are vectors in the complex plane, but why are they two dimensional? Why not three? Or one? I just don't get the idea of what amplitude is supposed to describe.

Thank you.

I believe I suggested earlier that I don't know what moral theory I hold, because I am not sure of the terminology. So I may, in fact, be a utilitarian, and not know it, because I have not the vocabulary to say so. I asked "At what point is utilitarianism not completely arbitrary?" because I wanted to know more about utilitarianism. That's all.

At what point is utilitarianism not completely arbitrary?

No-one asked for a general explanation.

The best term I have found, the one that seems to describe the way I evaluate situations the most accurately, is consequentialism. However, that may still be inaccurate. I don't have a fully reliable way to determine what consequentialism entails; all I have is Wikipedia, at the moment.

I tend to just use cost-benefit analysis. I also have a mental, and quite arbitrary, scale of what things I do and don't value, and to what degree, to avoid situations where I am presented with multiple, equally beneficial choices. I al... (read more)

I don't agree. The existence 3^^^3 people, or 3^^^3 dust specks, is impossible because there isn't enough matter, as you said. The existence of an event that has only effects that are tailored to fit a particular person's idea of 'bad' does not fit my model of how causality works. That seems like a worse infraction, to me.

However, all of that is irrelevant, because I answered the more "interesting question" in the comment you quoted. To be blunt, why are we still talking about this?

Yes. I believe that because any suffering caused by the 3^^^3 dust specks is spread across 3^^^3 people, it is of lesser evil than torturing a man for 50 years. Assuming there to be no side effects to the dust specks.

That is in no way what was said. Also, the idea of an event that somehow manages to have no effect aside from being bad is... insanely contrived. More contrived than the dilemma itself.

However, let's say that instead of 3^^^3 people getting dust in their eye, 3^^^3 people experience a single nano-second of despair, which is immediately erased from their memory to prevent any psychological damage. If I had a choice between that and torturing a person for 50 years, then I would probably choose the former.

No, I'm pretty sure it makes you notice. It's "enough". "barely enough", but still "enough". However, that doesn't seem to be what's really important. If I consider you to be correct in your interpretation of the dilemma, in that there are no other side effects, then yes, the 3^^^3 people getting dust in their eyes is a much better choice.

Better late than never.

You haven't said anything. Make a relevant point.

... What is it that frequentists do, again? I'm a little out of touch.

I missed newton by over 150 years. Pray for a curve.