All of PlaidX's Comments + Replies

I don't like contentless discussions of art either, but spewing paragraph after paragraph of awkward, stilted jargon about your hypothetical personal feelings isn't content, especially when they relate to a movie you haven't even seen!

If my friend says "That movie sucked", and I disagree, I ask "why".

If my friend says "I liked the animation, but the timing is terrible. Everyone telegraphs their reactions", that's a discussion of the film that's actually going somewhere.

If my friend says "Like everyone, I enjoy the physica... (read more)

The latter. Actually, I guess I still consume a lot of unknown things, but now almost exclusively online, where when the thing sucks, you can instantly move on to something else.

Much better to download a movie and watch five minutes of it and delete it than to coordinate going to the theater with someone, buy overpriced popcorn, watch a bunch of ads, then sit through an hour and a half of something you don't really like.

I can't really tell whether this is me failing to appreciate some aspect of human experience, or just that the way people tend to do things is stupid.

Yeah, really what I find to be the ugliest thing about lesswrong by far is the sense of self-importance, which contributed to the post deletion quite a bit as well.

Maybe it's the combination of these factors that's the problem. When I read mainstream philosophical discourse about pushing a fat man in front of a trolley, it just seems like a goofy hypothetical example.

But lesswrong seems to believe that it carries the world on its shoulders, and that when they talk about deciding between torture and dust specks, or torture and alien invasion, or torture and... (read more)

Considering this style of thinking has lead lesswrong to redact whole sets of posts out of (arguably quite delusional) cosmic horror, I think there's plenty of neurosis to go around, and that it runs all the way to the top.

I can certainly believe not everybody here is part of it, but even then, it seems in poor taste. The moral problems you link to don't strike me as philosophically illuminating, they just seem like something to talk about at a bad party.

I've found that I have the opposite problem. When given the opportunity to try something new, I take it, thinking "maybe this time", and invariably regret doing so.

Now I order the same food every time in restaurants, never go to shows, and am a happier person for it.

Someone even more cynical might say that lesswrong only departs from mainstream skeptical scientific consensus in ways that coincidentally line up exactly with the views of eliezer yudkowsky, and that it's basically an echo chamber.

That said, rational thinking is a great ideal, and I think it's awesome that lesswrong even TRIES to live up to it.

I haven't read TOO much mainstream philosophy, but in what I have, I don't recall even a single instance of torture being used to illustrate a point.

Maybe that's what's holding them back from being truly rational?

I've heard that before, and I grant that there's some validity to it, but that's not all that's going on here. 90% of the time, torture isn't even relevant to the question the what-if is designed to answer.

The use of torture in these hypotheticals generally seems to have less to do with ANALYZING cognitive algorithms, and more to do with "getting tough" on cognitive algorithms. Grinding an axe or just wallowing in self-destructive paranoia.

If the point you're making really only applies to torture, fine. But otherwise, it tends to read like "... (read more)

Creepily heavy reliance on torture-based what-if scenarios.

Ok, I'm back online. I basically flaked out partway through day two, I think I overextended myself.

However, the twitching or convulsing is still here, whenever I meditate, and after conferring with a medical professional, I'm pretty sure it's a meditation related thing, and not due to hyperventilation or somesuch. In fact, he explicitly said "yeah, that's from meditation. don't even try looking for a medical explanation."

SO, not exactly PLEASANT or ILLUMINATING results, but results nonetheless. I'm going to try going back to an hour or so of daily meditation and see how things develop for a while.

It seems like an awful LOT of twitching, though. Like, so much so that I ended up hyperventilating to compensate for it. Is this really typical?

I should note that my concentration still isn't that great, and I haven't really experienced anything unusual on a mental level.

No, go ahead and say what you think, I'm a bit flummoxed at this point. Too much twitching.

Aha, I had a nagging feeling there might be something like that going on.

Any idea what the involuntary spasms are about? I did another hour of sitting, and while I didn't have the tingling and such this time, the spasm came back as strong as ever. In fact, I'm inclined to discontinue things until I can figure out what the deal is with them.

Even laying down, breathing calmly, I'm just twitchy as hell. It stops as soon as I stop meditating.

EDIT: Here's something from wikipedia.

Cortical reflex myoclonus is thought to be a type of epilepsy that originates in t... (read more)

WOAH, holy crap. Ok, I'm doing a retreat (in my own house, by myself) and i'm only four and a half hours in, but i'm breaking retreat protocol and going on the computer because I have to tell you guys how unexpected what's happened so far is. Woo, ok, sensations subsiding, getting feeling back in my fingers.

I've been meditating for about six months now, starting at 20 minutes a day and gradually moving up to an hour and a half, with no discernible effect other than my butt getting sore. When daniel posted these articles, I was getting so demoralized with m... (read more)

Sorry, I read the first sentence first, and so experienced a minor full-body orgasm.

You're either the greatest imagineer I've ever met, or a big fat liar.

I know where you're coming from, but "they" is already the world's gender-neutral third person pronoun of choice, so why pick a different one? Even if it wasn't, you've got to pick your battles.

the fact that God cannot do something that cannot be done does not limit His omnipotence.

The point is that "omnipotent" is itself a "hollow adjective", as you put it. Omnipotent doesn't mean "you can do anything that can be done", it means you can do anything, full stop.

Wow, I often curse the world for not dropping the information I need into my lap, but here it seems to be on a silver platter. When I got around to reading this post, I had literally 23 tabs open, all of them about research into meditation.

I've been meditating for about six months and in the last week or so, getting disenchanted with the mainstream (within theravada buddhism) model of the path, and looking into alternate sources of information.

It's excellent to see that there's people already succeeding in the independent investigation I was wearily beginning to attempt!

I like it, but stop using "ey". For god's sake, just use "they".

I still have a hard time seeing how any of this is going to go somewhere useful.

[skims article]

Skim more. Got it.

The role of fun in maintaining mental health should also be noted. All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.

For me, the important distinction between the salmon thing and the Mohammad thing is that getting zapped when you see a picture of a salmon is a reaction that doesn't go away through exposure. It can't be desensitized. Drawing Mohammad, or really any form of trolling, eventually gets savvy people to change the way they react.

That's not to say that trolling is necessarily good, but it is functionally different than what's happening with the salmon. See this article by Clay Shirky.

If my qualia were actually those of a computer chip, then rather than feeling hot I would feel purple (or rather, some quale that no human language can describe), and if you asked me why I went back indoors even though I don't have any particular objection to purple and the weather is not nearly severe enough to pose any serious threat to my health, I wouldn't be able to answer you or in any way connect my qualia to my actions.

But in the simulation, you WOULD have an objection to purple, and you would call purple "hot", right? Or is this some ... (read more)

I will go to this as long as that libertarian guy won't be there.

If the memetic hazard you're referring to is the same one as mine, I recommend benzodiazepines in the short term and vipassana meditation in the long term. And just thinking about it, though clearly you're already doing that.

I think to a large extent, the percieved threat of the thing is due to a generally neurotic perspective, common to many people here, which can twist abstract thinking into knots when given a sufficiently long and nonintuitive chain of reasoning. The trauma illuminates a serious problem with the mind rather than a serious threat from the idea.

Sorry, I couldn't see your reply when I did my edit. I should've reloaded.

Alternative Voting, also known as instant runoff voting, produces results very similar to first past the post, while introducing massive headaches. You want range voting or approval voting instead.

IRV leads to 2-party domination

There are three IRV countries: Ireland (mandated in their 1937 constitution), Australia (adopted STV in the early 1900s, but in 1949 added "reweighting" to STV in their multi-winner elections, a change which does not matter for us since we are only considering single-winner elections - Australia and Ireland have both kin

Hmm. I wonder what situationism says about living alone and not interacting with anyone. Does it mean no influence, or feedback from your own traits, or what?

I came to the comments section to make this exact post.

Fair enough. How many IQ points would you say make a fair exchange for lesswrong's teachings?

Oops, edits crossed in midstream. This reply made a lot more sense in conjunction with the original post as it was originally written.

Edit: Haha, yes.

Hmm... I'm certainly not SURPRISED by it, but I don't share it, no. I see it as being a crooked sort of kludge necessitated by the idea that people are equally valuable. "people" is a very big and complicated category, and treating it as a single moral point leads to weirdness.

Practically speaking, a person gets created over an extremely protracted period. It's not when they're conceived, it's not when they're born, it's not when they learn to speak or use the internet, it's the entire process. In contrast, people die close to instantaneously. &q... (read more)

For the op and others here who consider preservation of human life a terminal goal: do you also consider the creation of human life a terminal goal of the same magnitude? If not, why not?

I find it very unintuitive that something's creation could be unwarranted but its preservation vital, terminally, independent of any other considerations.

Unfortunately, none of my interests seem to involve group activities.

I have difficulty meeting people I like even on the internet, where there's zillions of them and they can be easily sorted through.

Sure. Learning things I couldn't learn on wikipedia, finding something good to eat, making a meaningful connection with people, enjoying myself, etc.

It's not some existential angst, I'm just hard to please.

Meaning what?

Classes, lectures, trying new food, going on dates... it's not that these things are ever huge letdowns, I'm just not glad I did them.

One of my biggest problems is making new friends. I try sometimes, despite my better judgment, but the amount of time and effort necessary to forge a friendship worth having, or perhaps to reformat the person in question into someone worth having for a friend, seems astronomical. It feels like I only managed to make the friends I have because when I started I had no friends and it was the only option, the way kids are forced by the world to learn a language.

I would like this to be true, but in my personal experience, it is not. Whenever I go try things, the result is the same. Waste of time, waste of time, waste of time and bus fare.

It wasn't just one person, it was three or four. And it wasn't just that they INVOKED torture, it was that they clung to it like a life preserver, like it was the magic ingredient for winning the argument.

This is so far outside the bounds of civil discourse, and yet it's routine in this community. I don't think it's unwarranted to be generally concerned.

In the last meetup I went to, there was an obnoxious guy who was dominating the conversation, and somehow got into a relativism-based defense of something, I think just to be contrary.

Several other people jumped on him at this point, and soon the argument swung around to "what about torture? what if you were being tortured?" and he came up with rationalizations about how what doesn't kill you makes you stronger, it'd be a great story, etc. etc., and so they kept piling on qualifications, saying "they torture you for 50 years and then execute... (read more)

I see your point, but I guess my problem is that I don't see why constructing these tradeoffs is productive in the first place. It just seems like a party game where people ask what you'd do for a million dollars.

Like, in the situation here, with uploading, why does immortality even need to be part of equation? All he's really saying is "intuitively, it doesn't seem like an upload would 'really' be me". What happens to the upload, and what happens to the original, is just a carnival of distractions anyway. We can easily swap them around and see that they have no bearing on the issue.

I think part of what bothers me about these things is I get the impression the readers of lesswrong are PICKING UP these neuroses from each other, learning by example that this is how you go about things.

Need to clarify an ethical question, or get an intuitive read on some esoteric decision theory thing, or just make a point? Add torture! If yudkowsky does it, it must be a rational and healthy way to think, right?

Why do people feel the need to discuss "huge relative disutilities"? What's the difference between that and being obnoxiously hyperbolic?

In the current example, I'm not even sure what kind of point he's trying to make. It sounds like he's saying "Some people like bagels. But what if someone poisoned your bagel with a poison that made your blood turn into fire ants?"

Is this an autism thing? There were people doing this at the meetup I went to as well.

Why does every other hypothetical situation on this site involve torture or horrible pain? What is wrong with you people?

Edit: I realize I've been unduly inflammatory about this. I'll restrict myself in the future to offering non-torture alternative formulations of scenarios when appropriate.

People on average increase in societal value from conception to childhood, and then it gets more complicated from there depending on how they turn out. And yes, typically their value declines as they become elderly.

But, as in your example with your adopted friend, even a baby that starts out unwanted, if society invests a bit in its welfare, will soon become part of the social fabric and so on and thereby become valued.

Certainly there are some people who literally nobody likes, but even then, there's still reason B.

As it happens, my best friend was adopted as well. But I hardly think the limiting factor in the number or quality of my friends is society's production of babies.

Yeah, this is more or less what I meant by B, with the caveat that alice and bob may fundamentally disagree on who's better off dead.

Let me turn your question around. If your utility function puts value in the mere existence of people, regardless of how they interact with the larger world, doesn't that mean having babies is as wonderful as killing people is terrible? Is somebody with 12 kids a hero?