All of rthomas2's Comments + Replies

When “Old One” and “the Blight” are mentioned: which characters are these?

6gwern
They are characters in the well-known Vinge SF novel A Fire Upon the Deep.

The word “aligned” is being used here in a way that seems subtly different than what I’ve heard before. A quick definition and/or link to the place(s) this usage comes from would be really useful.

8Raemon
I'm not sure there's a single post explaining the use of "aligned", but a common use of the phrase on LessWrong is to mean something like "having the same goals as you, or able to act as if they had the same goals as you such that you could grant them arbitrary power and wouldn't regret it."

I haven’t ever seen an academic article so direct and even sardonic, especially not one railing against such an established practice. I guess that’s what a Molotov cocktail looks like in print.

That wasn’t just clear and impactful, it was fun to read. Thanks for linking, lifelonglearner.

Welcome!

Also...I think it still may need a fix: paragraph 11 now reads

normative way; that you should wire it the way I say just because,

but I think you want to swap the comma with the semi-colon:

normative way, that you should wire it the way I say just because;

This is fantastic and absolutely the conversation I want to be having.

Ditto on everything Qiaochu_Yuan said. Huge thanks for writing this, Romeo.

Two typo fixes that would have saved me a headache:

Paragraph 11:

normative way. Like you should wire

I think you meant “normative way, like you should wire”

Second-to-last paragraph:

Though the Buddha taught one specific concentration technique and a series of simple insight techniques, but there are probably a dozen

I think you meant to omit either “Though” or “but”

2romeostevensit
Thanks!

When something is accepted as true, then observations to the contrary become surprising. So, if I’m surprised to find it raining out, then I’d assumed it was going to be sunny.

I think you’re exactly right that distinguishing between what people claim, and then what they turn out to actually expect, is the important thing here. My argument is that alief/belief (or belief in belief), as terms, make this harder. I just used the words “claim” and “expectation”, and I would be immensely surprised if anyone misunderstands me. (To be redundant to the point of silliness: I claim that’s my expectation.)

“Belief” has, I think, lost any coherent definition. It seems now, not to refer to expectations, but to mean “I want to expect X.”

... (read more)

Like u/gworley, I’m not a fan of the alief/belief distinction. I take a slightly different tack: I think that belief, and related terms, are just poorly defined. I find it easier to talk about expectations.

“Expectations” is, I think, a term best operationalized as “things that surprise a person if they don’t happen, while not surprising said person if they do happen.” (I started thinking of this due to the “invisible dragon” from the Sequences.)

It’s empirically testable whether a person is non-plussed—sometimes this might be hard to notice, but almost a

... (read more)
0Conor Moreton
Loren ipsum

Hello! I'm Ryan; some of you may know me from the Boston or NYC meetups, or from my excursions to the Bay. I'm finally getting around to really using this account; anything that I posted more than a year or so ago can be safely ignored, or laughed at if you're in the mood for a chuckle. I'm hoping to primarily focus on longevity research and how people can work together well on things in general; currently collecting info to try and make a general post about the current state of the field. I'm thoroughly a layperson in most regards--I have a BA in psyc... (read more)

Thank you for your comment: you have shown me that I failed to make my intention plain. I have edited my original comment in the hopes of remedying this; please let me know if I have succeeded by up-voting, or if I have failed by down-voting and, if you are again willing to help me, offering me further critique :) My sincere thanks, again.

[This comment is no longer endorsed by its author]Reply

Here's a good one for any one who trusts the bible: Is the following true? If Mark 9:40 and Matthew 12:30 are both true, then God would not allow us to see, hear, think or feel anything that wasn't the best possible thing we could see, hear, think or feel at that moment. I know the philosophers at Notre Dame to be an exceedingly rational group, and so I believe they will respond by giving a wonderful explanation to you of the Christian belief that God is indeed with all people at all times, and that they need only open their hearts to love in order to receive all they desire.

[This comment is no longer endorsed by its author]Reply
1BloodyShrimp
Between people like us, this is somewhere between a failure to allow for the looseness of speech and the kind of interesting contradiction we like because it's evidence-rich, and probably closer to the former. To a religious person, this is just a pretty combative trap. There are a large number of such traps you can run on religious people, and they very rarely accomplish anything, because these almost always aren't the kind of people who take logic and rationality seriously enough to change their beliefs due to contradictions, but they normally are the kind of people who fail to Keep Their Identity Small and hence become personally offended when you try to bring up contradictions. Asking the philosophers he's going to see trap questions like this will just annoy them (they'll probably even see the "looseness of speech" explanation for this one), provoke useless stock answers, and waste the potential of the conversations.

Regarding the idea of "changing the future" invoked by the Majere quote:

The concept here relies upon some notion of causality. In order for it to be coherent, we have to think of the past and future as being determined--that if we knew both the state of the universe at a given time, and the laws of physics, we could calculate every other state the universe would ever have, or had ever had previously.

This conception doesn't really seem to jive with what very, very little I know about many worlds and quantum mechanics, so it could be utterly false... (read more)

What is the rational response to something like this? Because I still don't know what to think.

http://thedivinemercy.org/message/stfaustina/graces.php

I met Ms. Digan in person, and there's a bit more to the story than is told on the site; the two most important things are that 1) the doctors who examined her were not, as the site implies, Catholic stooges, just normal doctors, most of them atheist; and 2) her son, a very young child at the time, came with her to Poland and stayed behind in the room, and also experienced a healing--he had some sort of dege... (read more)

3Nectanebo
Just realise that the overwhelming majority of people who go to gods or saints with diseases like this don't get cured in this manner; what about them? What does that say about the effectiveness of miracles? There are plenty of situations that could have resulted in her getting better. Something to do with the travel, or perhaps the treatments started working, or perhaps for reasons current medicine doesn't know. Apparently, according to wikipedia we don't even know what the cause of lymphadema is. It could have been something she ate, who cares? People seemingly inexplicably get better from diseases all the time, and this one is no exception. These people wanting to attribute it to a saint or whatever doesn't mean anything much to me, and it seems much more likely that they are delusional or liars with regards to the events at the site and hearing the saint's voice and whatnot.
6Mitchell_Porter
Long-term physical conditions can be caused or aggravated by factors which religious people call spiritual, and which secular people call psychological. See the longer account of this story. The mother spent years of her life depressed, medicated, and in hospital. Perhaps the son's muscles were atrophying because he had a similar malaise. It was the healthy father who in a moment of despair had a religious experience and took his family across the world. The body is capable of amazing transformations and they can be prompted by a new set and setting. The heart will beat faster, posture will change, and that alone might relieve the pressure on the lymph nodes responsible for leg lymphedema. And then the son can respond to the new psychological mood in the family and show signs of life.
6Desrtopa
The first account claims that lymphedema does not go into remission. A simple google search refutes this; spontaneous remission of lymphedema is well documented. The second one doesn't even state what the man's heart recovered from. Accounts of miracles tend to systematically overrate their significance, when they're not made up entirely. I'd say the rational response is to assume one or the other is going on when you hear such an account. Knowing nothing about lymphedema as a medical condition, I was able to predict in advance that the claim that it does not go into remission would turn out to be false, on the basis of my experience with other miracle claims.

For me, thinking of the Dementors as death AND depression is a lot of fun--the idea that they're of the same essence is very cool to toss around. Which in turn makes the question of what patronuses are more tangled and intriguing...

Really, every attempt I make at reconciling the two worlds makes every facet of both more interesting! :)