All of Psilence's Comments + Replies

Psilence-20

You don't believe in free will, correct?

Psilence150

That's probably closer to the truth than one might think. Once a belief system moves beyond rote memorization of its basic principles and becomes associated with other domains, non-rational beliefs can get very heavily embedded with outside belief networks. The feedback loop that can be created by having just a few anecdotal connections to an already established system would be severe.

The key factor is that, for people who are not strict rationalists already, the "correlation=causation" attitude is quite strong, so any neuronal links I make fro... (read more)

1reaver121
Good point. That's why I here argued against thinking about things too long. It's even more important the less rational you are. Before you know it, you are past the point that any evidence can convince you that your opinion is wrong.
Psilence-30

This is good. It seems (to me) to mean that the LessWrong community is starting to "get the hang" of the importance of explanation...

By that I mean that a person who found themselves in the state of being "very" "intelligent" might, at the exact same time that they realized their state of intelligence had been the result of what we call "insights"--a working out of the problem on a level-independent way from the presuppositions inherent in the overwhelming bias of the problem as stated...

that that agent would also c... (read more)

3MrHen
Obviously this concept breaks down when considering the nature of communication. If I were a genius and moved to Kyrgyzstan I would never be understand because I don't know Kyrgyz or Russian. More relevantly, I would expect that the ability to explain things has a stronger correlation with the ability to model other minds than it does with intelligence.
0PhilGoetz
An oxymoron, or a tautology?

Hi all, my name's Drew. I stumbled upon the site from who-knows-where last week and must've put in 30-40 hours of reading already, so suffice to say I've found the writing/discussions quite enjoyable so far. I'm heavily interested in theories of human behavior on both a psychological and moral level, so most of the subject matter has been enjoyable. I was a big Hofstader fan a few years back as well, so the AI and consciousness discussions are interesting as well.

Anyway, thought I'd pop in and say hi, maybe I'll take part in some conversations soon. Looks like a great thing you've got going here.