All of ryleah's Comments + Replies

ryleah-10

In order to justify discarding the Noble Lie your Third Option needs to be mutually exclusive with the Noble Lie, otherwise you're discarding a utilitarian gain for nothing. If your five minutes of wild thought brings up ideas that only work if you also discard the Noble Lie, that's probably motivated reasoning as well.

ryleah00

I don't see upvote or downvote buttons anywhere. Did LW remove this feature, or is it something that's only happening to me specifically?

Edit: Also, the sort function is static in most but not all comment sections for me. I'm running Chrome.

ryleah20

"Intelligence is an emergent phenomenon!" means that intelligence didn't happen on purpose, or that intelligence doesn't need to be intentional in order to happen. Emergence as a term doesn't add a reason for a thing, but it does rule some out.

1Max Hodges
beautifully stated!
ryleah-10

The benefit of morality comes from the fact that brains are slow to come up with new ideas but quick to recall stored generalizations. If you can make useful rules and accurate generalizations by taking your time and considering possible hypotheticals ahead of time, then your behavior when you don't have time to be thoughtful will be based on what you want it to be based on, instead of television and things you've seen other monkeys doing.

Objective morality is a trick that people who come up with moralities that rely on co-operation play on people who can... (read more)

2Jiro
I'm not so sure of that myself. There are cases where I want others to realize that they don't need to follow their own morality. Sometimes people's morality leads them to do things that harm me. (I'm sure you can think of examples.)
ryleah40

Sorry to answer a 5 year old post, but apparently people read these things. You asked "Why should rationalists necessarily care a lot about other people," but all the post said was that they should be able to.

ryleah00

If parental health plays a role in this I would be interested in seeing if there's a correlation between parental vaccination and obesity.

ryleah160

Why aren't "rationalists" surrounded by a visible aura of formidability? Why aren't they found at the top level of every elite selected on any basis that has anything to do with thought? Why do most "rationalists" just seem like ordinary people, perhaps of moderately above-average intelligence, with one more hobbyhorse to ride?

I'm relatively new to rationality, but I've been a nihilist for nearly a decade. Since I've started taking developing my own morality seriously, I've put about 3500 hours of work into developing and strengthen... (read more)

ryleah70

I noticed that I was confused by your dragon analogy. 1) Why did this guy believe in this dragon when there was absolutely no evidence that it exists? 2) Why do I find the analogy so satisfying, when its premise is so absurd.

Observation 1) Religious people have evidence:

The thing about religion is that a given religion's effects on people tend to be predictable. When Christians tell you to accept Jesus into your heart, some of the less effective missionaries talk about heaven, but the better ones talk about positive changes to their emotional states. O... (read more)

ryleah20

Check out Erfworld. It starts off as a webcomic, moves to narrative for the parts that are best done in a narrative style, and then jumps back to webcomic format for battles. It hits all of those marks you mention, as well as a standard that I hold personally. I think that rationalist fiction is at its most compelling when it creates a world with new rules, and sends the empiricist out to learn them. It's easier to show how to learn things empirically when there's still low-hanging-fruit to be plucked, and there have to be people in the story who don't... (read more)

0AlanCrowe
Discussed here