Established intuitions don't accept these works but I do accept them. That means those institutions must suck and I don't. If you've actually dropped out of those established institutions, then I can definitely see why it might be the case.
Is this not negative?
Existential meaning. It seems that the individual's existential issues are generally correlated to the outreach of their own existence and the work associated with it. The more people they reach, the more meaningful they feel their work is. I was kind of trapped in this type of mindset for many years, thinking my life must be very meaningful because of how many people I've reached. If my work doesn't reach as many people, or even no one, then it must not be that meaningful. If that's the case, does the content and actual substance of the work mean anything...
Here are some purely hypothetical numbers just to illustrate this way of thinking:
I often see people pulling random numbers out of their asses on here.
The study's approach to mysticism seems to be rather qualitative than quantitative, based on self reporting and questionnaires, mostly from members of MAPS, whom probably have certain variables that aren't really controlled for compared to the general population.
...Mysticism Scale. This 32-item questionnaire (Hood
1975) contains items that ask participants about past mys-
tical experiences (if any). The Mysticism Scale has been
used in research on the psychology of religion (Spilka et
al. 2003) but has only previously been applied to drug
experiences by Griffiths
Yes I think exposure to triggers are very important in validating progress, just like how real skill level is measured by real work produced. That's why I don't really have much of a problem with the methodology employed. Triggers work both ways though if you are open-minded about who's teaching who. You can trigger me but I can't trigger you is bit of hypocrisy though. I don't really mind the one-sided dynamic. All I can say is good luck for the next decades and centuries.
Little o is just a tighter bound. I don't know what you are referring to by your statement:
That’s “little ” notation; it’s like big notation, but for things which are small rather than things which are large.
I guess he went back into the cave because he thought he didn't meditate enough because he wanted to hit that dude after he accidentally stepped on his foot? What was he like before he started meditating? How does meditation help him solve the problem of wanting to hit someone because they accidentally stepped on his foot?
That is exactly what I said in another comment about changing your state of mind and nothing else. Suggestions are outside of that change of state of mind. You seemed to be confused about mixing the effects of psychedelics and voodoo/woo/spiritual stuff. I know psychedelics being viewed as something related to spirituality is rather a popular rhetoric among both users and nonusers. The spirituality is what I mean by suggestion. You are suggesting something that has nothing to do with the mechanism of action of the drug.
I don't think psychedelics really do much for most people. I think for those who say they have been fundamentally altered by them most likely have a construed notion/prior before getting into the whole spiel. It's just a means to an end to them. Them thinking that psychedelics would change you fundamentally made them easier to give into the notion that they've fundamentally changed as a result of taking psychedelics rather than the psychedelics being part of the entire psychological journey they are going through, regardless of whether psychedelics were in...
You seem to be claiming that without somebody giving you suggestions, people would not think of psychedelic trips as something special.
Well, as the discoverer of the substance, Hoffman surely did not have any preconceptions, since the first time he was exposed to LSD it was an accident, and had no idea of it's psychedelic properties.
His account is freely available online here: https://www.hallucinogens.org/hofmann/child1.htm
A quote where he describes the second exposure, which was intentional experiment: "This self-experiment showed that LSD-25 behav...
spent years and years alone in a cave
A young boy standing in front of the yogi stepped back suddenly in fright—stomping right on the yogi’s bare foot. The yogi, angered and in pain, raised his walking staff to strike the youngster.
What did he do all those years? Seems a bit absurd to me.
The empathetic part probably comes from disconnecting oneself from personal human interactons that allow you to see people in a different light rather than how we see them when we interact with them. You are looking at the human society from the outside rather than how others affect your own interactions with them. It's a form of detachment that allows you to stop being emotionally invested in your interactions and opinions on fellow human beings. When you aren't emotionally invested, it's not difficult to see people as mere animals with their own human co...
I don't think I was advocating for either. I apologize if I came off as saying people should try psychedelics and meditation.
Pain, like money, is a measurable metric compared to skill level which is a much more abstract set of metrics to be measured on. We generally use tests and competitions to measure skill level, but during the personal growth period where those options aren't accessible, people tend to equate suffering as a result of learning to measure progress. Like you said, it's not very reliable since there is really no correlation between pain and skill level. Also your speed of learning can change how much time/enjoyment/suffering you go through as you learn, but ulti...
Psychedelics, woo, and meditation are very separate stuff. They are often used in conjunction with each other due to popularity and the context some of these things are discussed along with each other. Buddhism has incorporated meditation into its woo while other religions have mostly focused on group based services in terms of talking about their woos.
I like how some commenters have grouped psychedelics and meditation separate of the woo stuff, but it was a bit surprising to me to see Eliezer dismissing psychedelics along with woo in the same statements. ...
I probably misunderstood your comment and the original post too. Sorry about that. I find most of the stuff on this site pretty confusing. I was trying to talk about specific things that you guys have mentioned, but it probably is out of context.
Animals have civilizations, they are mostly limited to regional ecosystems. We just don't deal with animal civilizations on the same level as human-exclusive civilization concept.
The allegory is a story with many different points presented. I should've explained the aspect I was talking about. I was referring to the overall relationship between the different elements: the cave, outside the cave, the people inside the cave and the stuff they were doing inside the cave. The outside is the larger set, the cave is a subset, and the people are the individual el...
I wouldn't say that it explains the moral machinery. It's more of an observation science than an inferential or inductive/deductive process. The "just" is denoting the subset nature of moral machinery existing within the overarching concept of human civilization and development. The allegory of the cave concept is also a paradigm from which you can think about the set theory perspective of human civilization.
The moral machinery is just an manifestation of social hierarchy and societal structure that took civilizations thousands of years to distill into its current form. You can point to the perpetual process at any given time in history and study what came before and what happened after. As individuals, we make up the atomic elements of such hierarchy, so for us personally it's merely a exercise in understanding the underlying fundamental concepts behind the allegory of the cave.
First have a better idea of what you want to get out of reading. Entertainment: fictions. Knowledge: non-fictions. Current event update: news. Social discussions: social media (e.g. LW, Reddit, Facebook, etc.). Once you know what you are looking for exactly, or what kind of experience you are looking for, then you don't end up wasting your time on doing things that you don't consider productive.
When you take a break, I assume you just want some bite-sized, easily digestible content. News aren't really good with that stuff since it's mostly repetitive and m...
If you had the choice of not having sex but get to have your donated sperm fertilized vs having sex but never be able to have your own biological children, what would you choose?
Alignment is always contextual in regards to the social norms at the time. We've not had AI for that long so people assume that the alignment problem is a solve it once for all type of thing instead of an ever changing problem.
It's very similar in nature as in how they test new technologies for mass adoption. Things have been massively adopted before their safety is thoroughly researched, but you can only do so much before the demand for their necessity and people's impatience push for their ubiquity, like asbestos and radiation. When we fail to find alter...
This is all you can do in such type of scenarios:
observational study draws inferences from a sample to a population where the independent variable is not under the control of the researcher because of ethical concerns or logistical constraints.
Correlations and causation don't really work the same way as controlled scenarios, which makes it hard for rationalists who have little exposure outside of their expertise and way of thinking.
Observational studies, for lacking an assignment mechanism, naturally present difficulties for inferential analysis.
That can be said about any period in life. It's just a matter of perspective and circumstances. The best years are never the same for different people.
Most people remember their childhoods as a period of joy and their college years as some of the best of their lives.
This seems more anecdotal, and people becoming jaded as they grow older is a similar assertion in nature
Social deduction games
Yes doubts are useless if you don't look to answer them yourself. Most of the time, they can't be fully confirmed based on your own investigation because the collective knowledge is a lot more exhaustive than your own ability and time spent on looking at a few sources for answer. We all more or less share the same access to the same information that are available to us. Like they say about a new startup idea, it's probably been done already. Only very rarely you see something brand new that's not done before, and usually those are very domain specific beca...
Having doubts is crucial for better investigations. How you address those doubts and to what extend you address them dictate the success and practicality of your investigations. Some doubts are more easily solvable than others, but doubts are usually not really the direct focus of your investigations but of supplementary materials that can potentially change the course of of your methodology. It can affect how you value your work and what areas you think would be worthwhile to focus on in your future work.
I firmly believe that having doubts is better than ...
Definitely eye tracking, else people wouldn't have given me so much shit about my picture folder. I mean I don't even block my front facing camera on my phone anymore. Well good for them with their camera technology.
It takes extra resource to grow up and learn all the stuff that you've learned like K-12 and college education. You can't guarantee that the new person will be more efficient in using resources to grow than the existing person.
Why not? Each model is basically its own hypothesis.
Feels like I would expose my motivation system too much, and make myself vulnerable to possible manipulation.
Definitely. You should take precautions when people make themselves known as your adversary, either implicitly or explicitly each would amount to different counter strategies of course.
Personally, I've separated internally and externally influenced pride. Over time I've found that the externally influenced pride is of little to no value since people are very different from each other. Unless your sole focus is on social status and standings, then ex...
The more confirmations the better. They contribute different amount to each hypothesis. Then you narrow it down based on your margin of confidence.
What drove you to write this reply?
Communal sadism and the inability to recognize and control one's own primal urges. The outlet does not tame those urges but driving them toward their manifestations, giving form of those emotions and thoughts into actions. Warfare is the most extreme display of such human nature, but things like sports and fight for social status are also just different sides of the same coin. There is a very fine line between engaging in those activities for the sake of passive enjoyment and the desire to make winners and losers. Just look at competitive video games. The ...
I agree. You should leave professional issues to the professionals, else it's either a waste of time or you are trying to get a superficial glimpse of certain topic, which is fine if it's not toxic. The problem with politics is that it's too toxic for social interactions. The moment you get someone else involved with you on this garbage, you are doing them a disservice. You don't know how they can handle toxicity. There are better things to do in life. You have the freedom to waste your own time and swim in your own toxic waste, but getting someone else to...
It's just a means to an end for most people. The end is solidarity and gaining social status and self-esteem within their solidarity circle. Are they really making any real impact through their participation? Even if they do "research," they are just extracting results that others have gathered. They don't actually have any access to the institutions directly related to those issues, whether it's CDC or DoD. If they did have a role in those institutions, they wouldn't be participating in layman discussion outside of their profession in the first place. Do you really see professional politicians or medical researchers directly engaging the public regarding their job or research on social media outside of a few instances of Reddit AMA?
Monsters usually refer to the concept of threats to survival. Before we could form societies and wall off our dwellings, we had to live among other wild life and other tribes that might threaten our ability to survive. Nowadays these threats are much more abstract and elusive. It's really the changing temporal context that makes things much more nuanced on a case by case basis. Monsters such as slavery is a threat to the survival of a subgroup just like politically incorrect speech only threaten a subgroup as well. Humanity is much more stratified now than...
Your experience is certainly valid. I was making a generalization in comparison to relationship with a sexual reproduction partner.
I was referring to the fact that the ancestors of sapiens probably didn't live in tribes but have developed sexual reproduction. It is also possible that the ability to feel emotions only developed after we have adopted the tribal lifestyle.
The association transitivity is applied on the individual level rather than on the ideas of the individuals. Most individual's beliefs and thoughts may remain almost static through time, and maybe it became the default level of association transitivity because of it.
As you said that actually being uncertain really doesn't happen because the development of concrete world view is important for survival as the person grows up from childhood. Schools certainly don't focus much on uncertainty itself. It has to be derived from the individual's own willingness to...
I do think a lot of it comes from evolutionary imperatives. Sex came before tribes. Platonic friendships come and go but we don't really feel emotionally hurt from them. Polyamory is a mixture of those two main types of interpersonal relationships. For polyamory to become the default, the very foundation of society has to change for children to grow up and develop a very different set of normative behaviors. Of course other aspects of life would change along with it such as who makes money for the family, the institutions that people develop their world vi...
Platonic friendships come and go but we don't really feel emotionally hurt from them.
Wow, that's so not my experience. I get hurt by those a lot.
The only reason ivy league MBA has easier time is because the symbol is used as a shortcut of the actual vetting process of qualifications, so are most social status symbols. They indicate certain qualities and expertise on certain topics because of the general process involved in getting those status symbols in the first place. Of course the actual usefulness of the individuals have to be vetted by doing real work. Outside of playing a role in the production of actual substance, they are mostly used in human social interactions and communications to induce specific positive emotions in said individuals.
Uhh. Sadly, this attitude is quite common, so I will try to explain. Some people are in general more gullible or easier to impress, yes. But that is just a part of equation. The remaining parts are:
- everyone is more vulnerable to manipulation that is compatible with their already existing opinions and desires;
- people are differently vulnerable at different moment of their lives, so it's a question of luck whether you encounter the manipulation at your strongest or weakest moment;
- the environment can increase or decrease your resistance: how much free time you
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