anecdote: David Ingram (who claims to be enlightened) came to a cogsci lab at my school, and was able to perceive some normally-imperceptible "subliminal" visual stimuli (i.e. X milliseconds long flash or whatever). I heard it from a friend who administered the test, I don't have the raw data or an article, grains of salt and all that.
"... must relinquish bodily pain, embarrassment, and romantic troubles."
that's worse than letting billions of children be tortured to death every year. that's worse than dying from a supernova. that's worse than dying from mass suicide. that's worse than dying because you can't have sex with geniuses to gain their minds and thus avert the cause of death that you die from.
you really think existence without pain is that bad? you really they are not "true humans".
what about the 3WC humans? are they not "true humans" either. only ...
"we irrationally find present costs more salient than future costs"
Present Bias is not always irrational!
it can be rationalized (as in, "find rational cause" not "make up excuse") as hedging against uncertainty. the future is never certain. our predictions about the future aren't even probable. if you save your money instead of spending it, you might lose it all to madoff. if you don't use that giftcard to some restaurant, your tastes might change and it won't be worth anything.
in fact, Geometric Discouting maximizes average (...
have you succeeded in chaining these "one-inference-steps"?
that is, have you found you can take people with different beliefs / less domain knowledge, in casual conversation, and quickly explain things one inference at a time? i've found that i can only pull a few of those, even if they follow and are delightfully surprised by each one, else i start sounding too weird.
indeed.
if we decouple the cost of caching into "was true but is false" and "was never true", it may be that one dominates the other in likelihood. so maybe, the most efficient solution to the "cached thought" problem is not rethinking things, but ignoring most things by default. this, however, has the opportunity cost of false negatives.
i've personally found that i am very dependent on cached thoughts when learning/doing something new (not necessarily bad). like breadth over depth. what i do is try to force each cached though...
right, that's what motivated the post. I feel like spending time learning "domain specific knowledge" is much more effective than "general rationality techniques". like even if you want to get better at three totally different things over the course of a few years, the time spent on the general technique (that could help all three) might not help as much as on exclusively specific techni... (read more)