All of SeanMCoincon's Comments + Replies

Make your mind flexible. Achieve & maintain full mental range of movement. Don't get "stiff", and view mental inflexibility as a risk to your mental health.

There's a fun (or at least "fun") exercise in which I regularly engage at my heavily right-wing, ex-military workplace: I try to agree with the guys who are in knee-jerk agreement with Fox News. I find this helps immensely with mental flexibility, as it forces me to try to actually reason from a foreign point of view. For example: when my coworkers are vociferously agreeing ... (read more)

"Millions long for immortality who do not know what to do with themselves on a rainy Sunday afternoon,"

Of late, during my discussions with others about rational politics and eudaimonia, I've been experiencing a strangely significant proportion of people (particularly the religious) asking me - with no irony - "What would you even DO with immortality?" My favored response: "Anything. And everything. In that order." LessWrong and HP:MoR has played no small part in that answer, and much of the further discussion that generally ensues.

So... thanks, everyone!

Through great meringues, great science. :D

DAMN. IT.

"There might be - if you were just picking the simplest rules you could manage - a physical constant which related the metric of relatedness (space) to the metric of determination (time) and so enforced a simple continuous analogue of local causality... ...in our universe, we call it c, the speed of light."

I am now starting to REALLY lament my lack of formal education, because I JUST NOW managed to grasp why the whole "speed of light" thing makes sense. Stupid poverty, ruin my fun. :D

"The axioms aren't things you're arbitrarily making up, or assuming for convenience-of-proof, about some pre-existent thing called numbers. You need axioms to pin down a mathematical universe before you can talk about it in the first place. The axioms are pinning down what the heck this 'NUM-burz' sound means in the first place - that your mouth is talking about 0, 1, 2, 3, and so on."

Ok NOW I finally get the whole Peano arithmetic thing. ...Took me long enough. Thanks kindly, unusually-fast-thinking mathematician!

"It should be another matter if someone seems interested in the process, better yet the math, and has some non-zero grasp of it, and are just coming to different conclusions than the local consensus."

I anticipate that helping such people gain a better grasp of the process may well be the best possible demonstration that you care about the process itself. At minimum, providing rationalist adjustments to people's conclusions helps ME feel as though I have regard for the process, even if I'm currently still struggling to implement the process rigorously when deriving conclusions of my own.

"Remember—boredom is the enemy, not some abstract 'failure.'"

Boredom is the mind-killer. Boredom is the little-death that brings total obliteration. I will face my boredom. I will permit it to pass over me and through me. And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path. Where the boredom has gone there will be... all kinds of interesting shit, actually. Which I might never have noticed... had boredom not driven me to look.

"The way to imagine how a truly unsympathetic mind sees a human, is to imagine yourself as a useful machine with levers on it."

Or imagine how you feel about your office computer. Not your own personal computer, which you get to use and towards which you may indeed have some projected affection. Think of the shitty company-bought computer you have to deal with on a daily basis, else you get fired. That's right. NOT AT ALL. "That damned thing CAUSES more problems than it SOLVES!"

I finally admitted to myself that I exhibit all the signs and underpinning patterns of thought associated with Impostor Syndrome, and asked an actual human being (!!!) for help. My hope is not that I will thus have more things about which to brag, but will feel something other than guilt over my successes. Fun times!

@CronoDAS - I used to play a very long time ago, but attempting to keep up with the expansions became too expensive, so I let the hobby lapse. This decision was made when Ice Age came out, so... there's your timeline. However, I did manage to acquire the old 2004 "Shandalar" PC version, which has been delightful both tactically and strategically (the overland game - defeating NPCs and ganking their cards - may be even more enjoyable to me than the card game itself). While I haven't tried the more recent multiplayer video game version, I'd definitely be amenable. So let me know. I can be reached at DarianSentient@gmail.com if you prefer, or if anyone else reading this would like to reach out, as well.

http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/TheChampion

I just finished moving to the Bay Area, from a house right down the street from Focus On The Family's world headquarters. ...Bit of a change.

Somewhere out in mind design space, there's a mind with any possible prior; but that doesn't mean that you'll say, "All priors are created equal."

The corrected phrase may be: "All unentangled priors are created equal."

"No, I did not go through the traditional apprenticeship. But when I look back, and see what Eliezer18 did wrong, I see plenty of modern scientists making the same mistakes. I cannot detect any sign that they were better warned than myself."

It seems like a viable means of propagating education about such mistakes - or the mistakes of aspiring rationalists in general - would be to set up (relatively) straightforward scientific experiments that purposefully make a given mistake and then allow students to perform the experiment unsuccessfully. ... (read more)

I find that the realization of consilience can be "as" good as original discovery; for me, the discovery that an idea about the world - even one posited centuries ago - comprehensively makes sense in the context of everything else known about reality is, itself, an original discovery.

It's just one that's unique to you or me.

"... people seem to get a tremendous emotional kick out of not knowing something. " Could be simple schadenfreude: asserting that "no one" knows a thing, even those demonstrably more intelligent than yourself, has the emotional effect of knocking them down into the same mud in which you already believe yourself to be mired. Not productive, but good solace for those unwilling to be productive.

My favorite part, at which there was actual LOLing:

"•[Imaginary Model Alicorn] acquired a certain level of status (respect for her mind-hacking skills and the approval that comes with having an approved-of "sensible" romantic orientation) within a relevant subculture. She got to write this post to claim said status publicly, and accumulate delicious karma. And she got to make this meta bullet point."

"...Although, do please make the check out to 'Cash'."

"Could I regenerate this knowledge if it were somehow deleted from my mind?"

Epistemologically, that's my biggest problem with religion-as-morality, along with using anything else that qualifies as "fiction" as a primary source of philosophy. One of my early heuristic tests to determine if a given religious individual is within reach of reason is to ask them how they think they'd be able to recreate their religion if they'd never received education/indoctrination in that religion (makes a nice lead-in to "do people who've never hea... (read more)

"I wish I lived in an era where I could just tell my readers they have to thoroughly research something, without giving insult."

Is that not what this entire site is accomplishing?

Many big-L Libertarians I've met - along with those who consider themselves to be trench-fighters for Ayn Rand-ian Objectivism - seem to want to conflate "selfishness" with "enlightened self-interest" for the positive connotations of the latter... yet their rationale for various big-L proposals (such as "let's turn over national security to corporations, who will certainly never abuse the power to force decisions upon people") tends to be of the extremely rosy, happy death spiral, declare-anything-that-doesn't-fit-an-"ext... (read more)

Ha ha, this comment shows up on the Recent Comments feed at right as:

" Racism and sexism are pretty good

by SeanMCoincon on The uniquely awful example of theism | 0 points "

THAT certainly couldn't be misconstrued against me in any way! I think I'll run for Congress.

"And what would be the analogy to collapsing to form a Bose-Einstein condensate?"

...All of them moving into the same compound and acquiring an arsenal seems about right, particularly when you consider the increased chance of violent explosion.

This immediately brings to mind the old adage about it being better to be Socrates dissatisfied than a pig satisfied. I'd imagine, from the pig's point of view, that the loftiest height of piggy happiness was not terribly dissimilar from the baseline level of piggy contentment, so equating "happiness" to "contentment" would not be an inexcusable breach of piggy logic. Indeed, we humans pretty much have to infer this state of affairs when considering animal wellbeing ("appearance of sociobiological contentment approximates happine... (read more)

It may be useful to the cause of avoiding one's own potential happy death spirals (HDSs) to actively attempt to subvert the "my ideas are my children" trope. Perceived ownership of an idea or mental tool may be a prime contributor to HDS thinkery, giving rise to the kind of protectiveness we humans tend to provide our offspring whether or not they deserve it. The fact that our child started the fight with another child doesn't prevent us from stepping in on OUR child's side; the fact that our child is demonstrably average doesn't prevent us fro... (read more)

Agreed on all points; I've found it interesting in my conversations with anti-evolutionists that even doing the work of dispelling the straw man argument - "monkeys turning into humans", "why are there still monkeys", etc. - doesn't seem to change even their conception of the evolution argument; they STILL think all the science and reason in the world can be summarized as "monkeys turned into humans". Their degree of investment in opposing that argument may be too great for additional rationality to crack. When/if that becom... (read more)

Racism and sexism are pretty good candidates as well. Prejudice in general would be even more inclusive; one could even consider religion to be a special case of prejudice against reality.

"What on Earth makes you think monkeys can change into humans?"

It seems - based upon personal experience - that the difference between the rational and the irrational is that the rational at least attempts to present a cogent answer to such questions in a way that actually answers the question; the irrational just gets mad at you for asking.

The most useful skill I've developed has been in meeting immaturity (both in rationale and delivery) with maturity (ditto). I work in a heavily right-wing workplace that refuses to allow anything but Fox News on anything resembling a television. This is my training environment. Even in the presence of highly irrational and emotionally charged convictions, I've found that the ability to maintain an uninvested calm and slowly help my partner to make their argument better (through gradual consilience with reality) can result in ACTUALLY CHANGED MINDS. The... (read more)

My concern is less with the degree to which I wear the rationality mantle relative to others (which is low to the point of insignificance, though often depressing) and more with ensuring that the process I use to approach rationality is the best one available. To that end, I'm finding that lurking on LessWrong is a pretty effective process test, particularly since I tend to come back to articles I've previously read to see what further understanding I can extract in the light of previous articles. SCORING such a test is a more squiffy concept, though cor... (read more)

Oddly, this problem seems (to my philosopher/engineer mind) to have an exceedingly non-complex solution, and it depends not upon the chooser but upon Omega.

Here's the payout schema assumed by the two-boxer, for reference: 1) Both boxes predicted, both boxes picked: +$1,000 2) Both boxes predicted, only B picked: $0 3) Only B predicted, both boxes picked: +$1,001,000 4) Only B predicted, only B picked: +$1,000,000

Omega, being an unknowable superintelligence, qualifies as a force of nature from our current level of human understanding. Since... (read more)