It could be that even if it doesn't seem like that to you, it sounds like that to them. Surely almost everyone has gone through lots of experiences where they interpret someone correctly to have said something offensive, at which point the offender attempts to weasel out of it; perhaps that's the template you're matching in their mind, even if it's not what you're doing. By comparison, the number of interactions where someone is trying to explain a difficult concept is pretty small, outside of certain small groups.
I meet a few people who apparently wilfully and repeatedly misinterpret what I'm saying, even when told that wasn't what I meant at all and I don't know how to deal with that.
You mean like this?
"Man, that guy looks so gay, I just want to bash his fucking head in."
"My brother is gay."
"I didn't mean gay, I meant, like, gay."
Maybe you need to win their trust and improve your communication skills.
I strongly support the suggestion implied in one thread here of officially adopting the term "Lessath", the lesser folk.
One of my least popular comments on Less Wrong was that nobody was a "decent rationalist." Perhaps now is the time to explain what I meant by that.
Rationality is an ideal. Whether or not it's a particularly good ideal, it's definitely not a good description of any actually existing people, which proposition is approximately what this entire site is about. To me, being a "decent rationalist" would entail being decently rational: not perfectly rational, but at least mostly rational. It's clear that nobody approaches that state.
When people...
If we accept the premise that most of this work is being spent on a zero-sum game of competing for status and land, then it's a prisoner's-dilemma situation like doping in competitive sports, and a reasonable solution is some kind of regulation limiting that competition. Mandatory six-week vacations, requirements to close shops during certain hours, and hefty overtime multipliers coupled with generous minimum wages are three examples that occur in the real world.
A market fundamentalist might seek to use tradable caps, as with sulfur dioxide emissions, inst...
Oh, thank you! I didn't realize that. Perhaps a process could be developed? For example, maybe you could chill the body rapidly to organ-donation temperatures, garrote the neck, extract the organs while maintaining head blood pressure with the garrote, then remove the head and connect perfusion apparatus to it?
For example, maybe you could chill the body rapidly to organ-donation temperatures, garrote the neck,..
It's worse than I said, by the way. If the patient is donating kidneys and is brain dead, the cryonics people want the suspension to happen as soon as possible to minimize further brain damage. The organ donation people want the organ donation to happen when the surgical team and recipient are ready, so there will be conflict over the schedule.
In any case, the fraction of organ donors is small, and the fraction of cryonics cases is much smaller, and ...
Need it be one or the other? I was just reading Chalmers's Singularity paper, came to the bit where he says, "Although I am sympathetic with some forms of dualism about consciousness," and decided to reread this page. Which is hilarious.
Rebate schemes are not merely betting on consumer laziness; they are also a means of price discrimination. If you really need that $200, you're more likely to fill out the form.
Because "disapproving of" means that the right or ability doesn't comply with the speaker's moral values, while "abuse" means that the right or ability doesn't comply with objectively correct moral values?
If you can opt out of it, it's not mandatory! You could get the best of both worlds, though: vitrify your head and donate the rest of your body. The only loss is, I think, your corneas.
The process of vitrifying the head makes the rest of the body unsuitable for organ donations. If the organs are extracted first, then the large resulting leaks in the circulatory system make perfusing the brain difficult. If the organs are extracted after the brain is properly perfused, they've been perfused too, and with the wrong substances for the purposes of organ donation.
Well, but unlike the atom-cooling example, becoming a strict vegetarian doesn't cut off your communication with non-vegetarians.
It does make it more difficult to go to the steakhouse with them, or eat over at their house.
The language-learning case is an interesting example. There are some things you can do.
One is that, if you're extraverted, instead of studying Swahili by hunching over books of grammar, you can study Swahili by talking to cute Kenyan exchange students. This way, the actual process of learning itself is enjoyable. (Mostly. You'll still be embarrassed frequently, and it's in your interest to turn the embarrassment dial up further by asking them to correct your grammatical errors.)
Another is that you actually can make the decision to study Swahili "in ag...
The crucial difference here is that the two "instruments" share the same nature, but they are "measuring" different objects — that is, the hypothetical rationalists do not have access to the same observed evidence about the world. But by virtue of "measuring", among other things, one another, they are supposed to come into agreement.
It's also very helpful to know things like why someone might go around squaring differences and then summing them, and what kinds of situations that makes sense in. That way you can tell when you make errors of interpretation. For example, "differences pertaining to the squared" is a plausible but less likely interpretation of "squared differences", but knowing that people commonly square differences and then sum them in order to calculate an L₂ norm, often because they are going to take the derivative of the result so as to solve for a...
The AI is communicating in a perfectly clear fashion. But the human's internal inhibitions are blinding them to what is being communicated: they can look directly at it, but they can never understand what delusion the AI is trying to tell them about, because that would shake their faith in that delusion.
AKA FNORD
Some of the people you believe are dead are actually alive, but no matter how hard they try to get other people to notice them, their actions are immediately forgotten and any changes caused by those actions are rationalized away.
There seems to be strong evidence that this is true in Haïti.
No, because "decent rationalist" is an ideal to aspire to, not something that any actually existing humans have achieved. (I wonder if the downvotes on this comment are driven by ego or by a rational disagreement with what I said? Presumably if it were the latter, the downvoters would have explained their disagreement...)
There are plenty of drugs that stimulate temporary psychosis, and some of them, like LSD, are quite safe, physically. What makes you so wary?
(I haven't tried LSD myself, due in part to unpleasant experiences with Ritalin as a child.)
This is the only one that made the short hairs on the back of my neck stand up.
Since St. Augustine. One of the core tenets of their faith is that the existence of God can be proven through the use of reason alone, and throughout the centuries they have spent almost as much time as the rabbis arguing about dogma, although with a distinctly different attitude about the need to come to a conclusion.
Indeed. Were it not for the Catholic Church's assertion that the existence of God can be known through reason, I might have stopped short of pursuing my doubts all the way to atheism...
I'm sure :)
Now, to return my procrastinating energies to hacking out an improved ruby based bash replacement.
There are almost certainly more productive things you could procrastinate with.
Stranger in a Strange Land is fiction. Obviously it's possible to write about the idea of a religious cult that is a great vehicle for rationality, but it's equally possible to write about faster-than-light travel. Do you know of any real-life examples?
My experience suggests that even religious organizations that purport to venerate rationality (Objectivists, the Roman Catholic Church, possibly the Pythagoreans) are less effective at promoting rationality than other kinds of groups. Objectivists ended up being downright insane.
The number given in that article is 27 million slaves. Yet Wikipedia claims that 55 million people lived in the Roman Empire in AD 300-400. Were less than half of them slaves? (And that's ignoring the slaves in the rest of the world at the time.) The same page claims that in 1750, the world population was almost 800 million. Were 29 out of 30 people at the time really free? Surely slavery was more widespread among the hierarchical city cultures that left written records than among the "barbarians", but it's hard to imagine that the number has alw...
While "harder" drugs appear to give more pleasure while their effects are in place, their withdrawal symptoms are also that much more painful (e.g. compare withdrawal symptoms from cocaine with withdrawal symptoms from caffeine).
This doesn't hold in general, and in fact doesn't hold for your example. Cocaine has very rapid metabolism, and so withdrawal happens within a few hours of the last dose. From what I hear, typical symptoms include things like fatigue and anxiety, with anhedonia afterwards (which can last days to weeks). (Most of what i...
Based on that, curing all forms of insanity would reduce suicide dramatically, by about an order of magnitude; but it's only about 3 bits of evidence, which you could argue is fairly weak evidence.