All of SpectrumDT's Comments + Replies

I do not think I communicated my point properly. Let me try again:

Showing compassion is not free. It has a cost. To show compassion for someone you might need to take action to help them, or refrain from taking some action that might harm them.

How much effort do you spend on showing compassion for a human being?

How much effort do you spend on showing compassion for an earthworm?

How much effort do you spend on showing compassion for a plant?

How much effort do you spend on showing compassion for an NPC in a video game?

I don't know about you, but I am willing... (read more)

2Gordon Seidoh Worley
I think it's a mistake in many cases to let philosophy override what you care about. That's letting S2 do S1's job.   I'm not saying no one should ever be able to be convinced to care about something, only that the convincing, even if a logical argument is part of it, should not be all of it.

I have another question: It seems to me that philosophy of mind is valuable for ethical reasons because it attempts to figure out which things have minds that can experience enjoyment and suffering, which has implications for how we should act. Do you disagree?

2Gordon Seidoh Worley
I don't think a philosophy of mind is necessary for this, no, although I can see why it might seem like it is if you've already assumed that philosophy is necessary to understand the world. It's enough to just be able to model other minds in the world to know how to show them compassion, and even without modeling compassion can be enacted, even if it's not known to be compassionate behavior. This modeling need not rise to the level of philosophy to get the job done.

Good question!

I have gained a lot of emotion handling skill. This lets me be calmer and kinder to my wife and my son and other people. It also means I suffer less because I can more easily detect negative thoughts and feelings and (to some extent) disengage from them rather than feed them.

I am also slowly getting better at actively cultivating positive/happy/pleasant mind states.

I speak not from experience here, but according to my limited understanding, the idea is that most or all ideas of the "self" are more-or-less arbitrary abstractions like the Ship of Theseus. 

Via western philosophy of mind you can gain some understanding of this idea and convince yourself that it is probably true, but via meditation AFAIU it becomes possible to observe this directly in your own mind.

The benefits of "transcending" the concept of self, I believe, is that you suffer less and become happier.

3Mitchell_Porter
The denial of a self has long seemed to me a kind of delusion. I am very clearly having a particular stream of consciousness. It's not an arbitrary abstraction to say that it includes some experiences and does not include others. To say there is a self, is just to say that there is a being experiencing that stream of consciousness. Would you deny that, or are you saying something else? 
4lsusr
This is correct.

E.g., I expect someone from Camp 1 to have a much harder time "vibing".

Could I ask you to please elaborate on what you mean by this?

May I ask you some questions about your Camp #1 intutions (since I have pretty strong Camp #2 intuitions)?

As I see it, the really interesting qualia are not things like redness. The really interesting qualia are the ability to experience enjoyment and suffering.

I hope it is obvious that there exist some things that are able to suffer and enjoy - for example, humans. (And there probably exist other things which cannot.) Likewise, there exist things which can process information and act on it by moving their bodies and manipulating their environment. (This i... (read more)

The true test of a saint is this - if doing the right thing would lead to lifelong misery for you and your family, would you still do it?

This seems to be based on a false dichotomy: "Either I genuinely want to do good AT ANY AND ALL COSTS, or all my attempts to do good are insincere."

I would argue that there are other possibilities besides those two. A person can genuinely desire to do good because he truly likes to do good, but he has other likes and goals as well and will sometimes sacrifice one goal for the other.

1Jay
Fair enough, but I'd still say that most people do "good" (by which they mostly mean culturally approved things) as a strategy to achieve some more basic end.  In support of this proposition, I'll note that "good" is defined by different people in different ways that all generally correlate with cultural approval in common cases but strongly diverge in matters of basic principle.  See Scott Alexander's: The Tails Coming Apart as Metaphor for Life.

As far as I can tell, you do not really argue why you think platitudes contain valuable wisdom. You only have one example, and that one is super-vague. 

For me this post would be much better if you added several examples that show in more detail why the platitude is valuable.

I have heard a number of people saying that they don't want to give money to charity because they don't trust the charities spend the money well.

I'd feel much more comfortable with someone not in control over their own utility function than someone that is in control, based on the people I have encountered in life so far.

May I ask what kind of experiences you base this on?

1spkoc
Getting mugged, getting asked for bribes by gov officials, entitled crazy road rage people in traffic. Mind you this was (maybe overly) contextualized by the OP being an argument against social norms that force people to sacrifice personal utility even when it might produce net negative utility overall. In a broader context, status quo ethics dissidents often explicitly did the opposite, martyrising themselves for the public good. After all people fought throughout history to expand the circle of Who Matters to include more and more people. So I guess there's also a strong dose of living in the western world at the end of history: "we've got the right liberal ethics now and deviations from them tend to result in total utility losses". I'm not giving modern human rights advocates in most of the rest of the world enough credit. Or heck vegans and whatnot in the west. Who knows how the future will judge the moral circles we draw. Blast from the past, hadn't thought about this in ages.

Evidently you think your niece is worth more than half a sandwich.

2whestler
I notice they could have just dropped the sandwich as they ran, so it seems that there was a small part of them still valuing the sandwich enough to spend the half second giving it to the brother, in doing so, trading a fraction of a second of niece-drowning-time for the sandwich. Not that any of this decision would have been explicit, system 2 thinking. Carefully or even leasurely setting the sandwich aside and trading several seconds would be another thing entirely (and might make a good dark comedy skit).  I'm reminded of a first aid course I took once, where the instructor took pains to point out moments in which the person receiving CPR might be "innapropriate"  if their clothing had ridden up and was exposing them in some way, taking time to cover them up and make them "decent". I couldn't help but be somewhat outraged that this was even a consideration in the man's mind, when somebody's life was at risk. I suppose his perspective was different to mine, given he worked as an emergency responder and the risk of death was quite normalised to him, but he retained his sensibilities around modesty.

I do personally feel that there is some emotional core to love, so I'm sympathetic to the "it's a specific emotion" definition.

The definition of love as an emotion seems wrong to me, because emotions are short-lived. Intuitively, we think of statements like "I love my son" as being true all the time. But I do not experience an emotion of "love" towards him all the time. When I am away from him, hours can pass where I do not think of him at all, and when I am with him I sometimes feel an emotion of annoyance rather than "love". 

So this kind of definition does not seem to match how people use the concept.

I think the overwhelming majority of people in the US who are 'working 60-hour weeks, at jobs where they have to smile and bear it when their bosses abuse them' are also consuming large amounts of luxuries, and I think it's reasonable to conceptualize this as 'they are working longer hours than they have to in order to consume lots of luxuries'.

May I ask you two questions?

  1. Can you please list several things that you consider luxuries and which you believe these "poor" people spend a lot of money on?
  2. What evidence (and how much) do you base this on?
4Martin Randall
Aphyer was discussing "working 60-hour weeks, at jobs where they have to smile and bear it when their bosses abuse them", not specifically "poor" people. My experience of people working such hours, even on a low wage, is that they are proud of their work ethic and their ability to provide and that because of their hard work they have nice things and a path to retirement. They don't consider themselves poor - they are working hard precisely to not be poor. As a concrete example, people in the armed forces have to smile and bear it when their bosses send them into war zones, never mind lower level abuse like being yelled at and worked past the point of exhaustion and following deliberately stupid orders. That said, your question prompted me to get some statistics regarding the consumption patterns of low income households. I found the US BLS expenditure by income decile, and looked at the lowest decile. This is emphatically not the same thing as either "poor" or "working 60-hour weeks". People in this decile are not employed for 60hrs/week, because 60hrs/week for 40 weeks at federal minimum wage is $17,400 and puts someone in the second decile for income. Most of these people are retired or unemployed and spending down savings, which is why mean expenditure is $31,000/year vs mean income of $10,000/year. I welcome better data, I could not find it. Those caveats aside, the bottom decile spent, on average (mean): * 0.4% on sugar/sweets, $116/yr * 0.8% on alcohol, $236/yr. * 4.7% on food away from home, $1,458/yr * 3.8% on entertainment, $1,168/yr * 1.2% on nicotine, $383/yr We're looking at ~10% spending on these categories. From experience and reading I expect some fraction of spending in other categories to be "luxury" in the sense of not being strictly required, perhaps ~10%. This is in no way a criticism. Small luxuries are cheap and worth it. Few people would agree to work ~20% fewer hours if it meant living in abject poverty. I'm curious what answer you
4Lao Mein
When I made $1000 a month at my first job, I didn't buy new clothes for a year, had to ration my heating, and only ate out a few times a week. My main luxury expenses were a gym membership and heating the entire apartment on weekends. Honestly, anything that's not rice, chicken, cabbage, or rent is a luxury. Candy is a luxury. Takeout is a luxury. Going out for social events is a luxury. Romantic relationships and children are luxuries. I don't think it's impossible for Americans to be working 60 hours a week and consume no luxuries, but it's probably very difficult.

which sucks incredibly and is bad.

Your wording here makes me curious: Are you saying the same thing twice here, or are you saying two different things? Does the phrase "X sucks" mean the same thing to you as "X is bad", or is there a distinction?

5eukaryote
Mostly saying the same thing twice, a rhetorical flourish. I guess just really doubling down on how this is not good, in case the reader was like "well this sucks incredibly but maybe there's a good upside" and then got to the second part and was like "ah no I see now it is genuinely bad", or vice versa.

Realizing that your preferences can and do develop obviously opens the Pandora's box of actions which do change preferences.[1] The ability to do that breaks orthogonality. 

Could you please elaborate on how this "breaks orthogonality"? It is unclear to me what you think the ramifications of this are.

And sometimes communities do in fact have explicit “preferences” that will cost people status just by having different ones. It might even be costly to find out what those diffuse preferences are, and especially daunting for people new to a community.

Could you please give some examples of this? It is unclear to me what kind of things you are talking about here.

7DaystarEld
Sure. So, there are some workplaces have implicit cultural norms that aren't written down but are crucial for career advancement. Always being available and responding to emails quickly might be an unspoken expectation, or participating in after-work social events might not be mandatory but would be noted and count against people looking for promotion. Certain dress codes or communication styles might be rewarded or penalized beyond their actual professional relevance. In a community, this usually comes as a form of purity testing of some kind, but can also be related to preferences around how you socialize or what you spend your time doing. If you're in a community that thinks sex-work is low status, for example, and you want to ask if that's true... just asking might in fact be costly, because it might clue people in to your potential interest in doing it. Does that make sense?

or you don't really know yourself well

Why do you think that?

1Jay
Normal humans have a fairly limited set of true desires, the sort of things we see on Maslow's hierarchy of needs.  Food, safety, sex, belonging, esteem, etc.  If you've become so committed to your moral goals that they override your innate desires, you are (for lack of a better word) a saint.  But for most people, morality is a proxy goal that we pursue as a strategy to reach our true goals.  Most people act a culturally specified version of morality to gain esteem and all that goes with it (jobs, mates, friends, etc). Your true desires won't change much over your lifetime, but your strategies will change as you learn.  For example, I'm a lot less intellectual than I was 30 years ago.  Back then I was under the delusion that reading a 600-page book on quantum mechanics or social policy would somehow help me in life; I have since learned that it really doesn't. Clearly I'm what the OP would call a cynic, but it misunderstands us.  I'm a disbeliever, sure, but not a coward.  I know well that peculiar feeling you get just before you screw up your life to do the right thing, and a coward wouldn't.  I just no longer see much value in it.  As Machiavelli said, "he who neglects what is done for what ought to be done, sooner effects his ruin than his preservation." The true test of a saint is this - if doing the right thing would lead to lifelong misery for you and your family, would you still do it?

What I mean is that the distribution has a crazy variance (possibly no finite variance); take two "opportunities to do good" and compare them to each other, and an orders-of-magnitude difference is not rare.

Do you mean the differences between the expected utility upfront? Or do you mean the differences between the actual utility in the end (which the actor might have no way to accurately predict in advance)?

3abramdemski
I reject the principled distinction. To me, it's more of a spectrum.

I also think that in any kind of complex system, monocultures are fragile.

This is a valid point. But the world is far from a monoculture. Even if all currently endangered languages die out, we will have plenty of cultures left. 

If the world ends up with less than, say, 100 languages, then I agree it starts to make sense to preserve them. As it stands now, I think we have more than enough cultural diversity, and keeping tiny minority languages and cultures alive is not worth the opportunity cost.

3AnthonyC
There's truth to that for sure. The smaller and more isolated cultures have more variability, but cost more to try to preserve, and I don't have a good model to evaluate that balance.

It can be too slow to catch up to rapid change, but then in that case one of the things you want is a diversity of cultures for selection to act on.

Is this the problem that you are trying to solve by preserving cultures? Make the human race as a whole more resilient in the face of rapid change?

Is this really the reason why you think culture is important? Or is it a rationalization? 

I am skeptical for two reasons:

  1. Your argument about rapid change seems extremely different from your argument in the grandparent post where you talked about literature and p
... (read more)
3AnthonyC
Good questions! 1. The grandparent comment was talking about how actually preserving culture is much harder than preserving language, that we're not very good at it, and that when we've tried we've had mixed results and diminishing returns beyond in the long run. However, the long run followed a period where the preservation was really really impactful. The Middle East preserving Aristotle and other Greek and Roman works, and reintroducing them to Europe, basically kickstarted the Renaissance and the scientific revolution. That's a very big deal, and an example of what can happen when cultures coexist, last, and cross-pollinate. Chaucer I care much less about, but I mentioned it because it had been referenced even earlier in the same thread. 2. No, I don't. However, I also think that in any kind of complex system, monocultures are fragile. That's true whether it's farming, medicine, philosophy, operating systems, electricity generation, or a bunch of other things. I think those smaller cultures have a lot of accumulated-but-illegible value that is very easy to lose and very difficult to share with the larger world. In a lot of cases even the people living in a culture won't really know, in the historical or scientific senses, which parts of their culture are load-bearing and contributing to survival, or why, let alone which will be beneficial to outsiders now or in the future. And critically, most attempts to engage with them in a deep enough way will tend to destroy the culture before we can even begin to really understand it, let alone gain value from it. To that end, it would be great to be able to preserve the value long enough to actually develop understanding, without condemning anyone to isolation and poverty if they don't want that.   But in the long run, yes, I do think resilience is my core reason for wanting to preserve other cultures long enough to really understand them. I think we generally do a really bad job of trying to understand when culture

In those words it sounds like a bad thing, but look past the words and is it, really?

In my opinion, yes. That is why I posted the question.

3Richard_Kennaway
How far do you take this? What else would you have everyone sacrifice to saving lives? I am currently attending the Early Music Festival in Utrecht, 10 days of concerts of music at least 400 years old. Is everyone involved in this event — the performers whose whole career is in music, the audiences who are devoting their time to doing this and not something else, and all the people organizing it — engaging in dereliction of duty?
2AnthonyC
Culture is, among other things, a set of time-tested heuristics that are easier to pass along (for humans) than explicit knowledge, and easier to act on in real time than explicit reasoning.  It provides a set of default assumptions for how to navigate the world as it has existed  in the past. This, among other things, enables more efficient interactions between people who don't know each other well otherwise. It can be too slow to catch up to rapid change, but then in that case one of the things you want is a diversity of cultures for selection to act on.

I agree that the utility of preserving endangered languages is greater than zero. But how much greater.

These alternative ways of conceptualizing... how useful are they? What can we achieve with them? As far as I can tell, they are fun and interesting, but insignificant compared to other problems we can help solve.

Preservation of endangered languages involves raising children bilingually in the majority and endangered language...

Generally speaking, endangered languages are from a cultural minority and members of that minority culture enjoy being able to speak that language.

If the minority cultures can fix the problem themselves by teaching their children, great! Far be it from me to stop them from that. And of course the dominant cultures should not actively oppress minority languages.

But when outsiders are expected to put in extra effort to preserve minority langua... (read more)

2Richard_Kennaway
Everyone who is keeping an endangered language alive is, during the time they spend doing that, not saving human lives. Would you say that they are sacrificing humans to save the language? In those words it sounds like a bad thing, but look past the words and is it, really? Some make direct efforts to save lives. Others try to make a world fit for those lives to be lived in.

I was talking specifically about childhood language acquisition, where learning a new language doesn't require you to forgo reading tvtropes or watching buffy the vampire slayer, it's just part of your background acquisition the same way that children learn how gravity works and how to manipulate small objects as they grow up. 

It maybe easy for the child, but it can take a lot of effort and energy from the parents.

I am the father of a sort-of bilingual child. I am Danish and we live in Denmark, but my wife is Chinese. Our 4-year-old son speaks good Da... (read more)

To me this sound suspiciously like the "Fallacy of Grey". 

The Sophisticate: “The world isn’t black and white. No one does pure good or pure bad. It’s all gray. Therefore, no one is better than anyone else.”

The Zetet: “Knowing only gray, you conclude that all grays are the same shade. You mock the simplicity of the two-color view, yet you replace it with a one-color view . . .”

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/dLJv2CoRCgeC2mPgj/the-fallacy-of-gray 

3Dagon
Close, but not quite.  There well may be colors and gradients, but we're all very nearsighted and can't tell what anyone else is seeing, and there's no photography or ability to share the experiences and intuitions. There is no authority to tell us, no way to be sure that what we think is important is what matters to somebody else.

Is there any place in your sequence where you define what you mean by God? I have tried to read closely every time you mention the term, and I still do not understand what the term is supposed to refer to.

But my vague sense is that people mostly want frisbee and tea. I guess this isn't that surprising either, there's some kind of horror that's related to a nerd staring at the media that is actually popular and realizing "it's not bad [by nerd standards] by mistake. The people really did want Transformers 3."

I did not understand this. Could I get you to please explain it again?

(It is worth noting that I am a nerd who enjoyed Transformers 3...)

the amount of awe I feel going into European churches feels like some evidence against this.

This sounds to me like selection bias. Most people did not build churches. And I suspect you do not feel awestruck in every church. I suspect that you remember the new most awesome ones, built by exceptional people who felt exceptionally religious.

It really seems like these rituals, the architecture, all of it, was built to instill the sort of existential intensity that taking God seriously requires, and I have to imagine that this was at least somewhat real for mos

... (read more)

Contemplation of the vastness of everything we know about, of the tremendous unplumbed chasm of the unknown, of the vertigo-inducing forever of infinity, of the mystery of why there is anything at all or any subjectivity with which to try to confront it… any of these things can induce a shudder of humble awe in the most dyed-in-the-wool atheist.

Not me. At least, not reliably. When I contemplate the vastness of the universe I feel at most a very mild curiosity. When I contemplate philosophical problems such as "why there is anything at all" I mostly feel a mild frustration. Definitely not a shudder of awe.

I would think that some kind of "yay field" plays a part in addiction. Even very mild addictions. I feel a "yay field" each time I go to eat a cookie or a bowl of ice cream or the like.

I often use mystical language with phenomenal empiricism in mind. 

Could you please give some examples of this?

I am interested in evidence that there are large parts of society that have benefitted from mysticism in the way they benefited from quantitative reasoning (in the domain of getting things done, not in the domain of feeling good), or at least individuals who seem to have performed impressive feats I clearly care about.

Does "being happier" count as a feat that you care about?

The point, if you like, is that if you’re asked to explain some “woo” or “mysticism” or whatever, and you find yourself sounding like Morpheus sounds in the movie, you’re doing it wrong.

In my opinion this is true about most mentors in fiction. The mentoring we see on screen tends to be shitty mentoring, presumably because the writers or bosses believe that showing actual mentoring will lead to a less dramatic story. 

So mentors in fiction should not be used as role models.

(Scott Alexander had a blog post where he mentioned that the thing that got him to stop believing in history cranks was reading many different history cranks who all had very convincing but mutually exclusive theories of history. Kind of like that - if you can play with many different ways of seeing the world and noticing how they all seem convincing, then they may all become less convincing as a result.)

 

You might be thinking of this post about learned epistemic helplessness: https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/06/03/repost-epistemic-learned-helplessness/ 

3Kaj_Sotala
Ah that's the one, thanks! Edited the link into the post.

There is this video: https://youtu.be/OfgVQKy0lIQ on why Asian parents don't say "I love you" to their kids, and it analyzes how the same word in different languages has different meaning. 

As I see it, the video is compatible with my claim. Aini argues that "I love you" is a useful emotional signal in many situations, which I agree with in my OP. 

Aini also argues around 19-21 minutes in for clearer communication. Her example is that saying "I love you" is in some situations clearer communication than giving someone a platter of fruit. I agree, an... (read more)

Thanks. I will get around to watching that video later.

If you tried to define humour, analyze jokes, divide them in categories, and extract the hormones triggered in response to some stimuli caused by a certain joke, I would say you did not (on a certain level) understand humour better than a child who made a good joke and enjoy a good laugh.

Finale example I heard recently brought up again is Mary's room knowledge argument - no amount of classification of blue, understanding of light spectrum data etc replaces the experience of seeing blue. Likewise with l

... (read more)

"I loved her so much! How dare she dump me and start ignoring me! Now I will commit violence as revenge."

In this line of reasoning we have selfish desires masquerading as a virtue. The thing I label love is a complex of desire, attachment, and (limited) altruism. If I lump them all together as love, I can more easily convince myself that my desire and attachment are actually virtuous. Thus I can convince myself that my feeling of anger is righteous rather than petty. Thus I am more likely to act upon that anger and lash out with violence, on a small or lar... (read more)

Could I please get you to elaborate on what you think gets lost when I replace love with more well-defined terms?

I can think of one thing. It is a kind of emotional attachment to an idea due for cultural/memetic reasons. People are brought up to think that love is something super-important and valuable, even if they do not understand what it is. In this way, the term love can have a strong emotional effect. It communicates less actual meaning than a more specific term, but it communicates more emotion.

I think I covered it in my OP when I conceded that the ... (read more)

1DusanDNesic
If all that is lost could be defined, it would, by definition, not be lost once definition is expanded that much. There is this video: https://youtu.be/OfgVQKy0lIQ on why Asian parents don't say "I love you" to their kids, and it analyzes how the same word in different languages has different meaning. I would also add - to different people as well. So whatever you classify is always missing something in the gaps. It's the issue of legibilizing (in Seeing Like a State terms) - in trying to define it, you restrict it to only those things. A lot of the meaning of the word Love is contained within me, with my emotions, with my messy mind thinking fuzzy thoughts. If I restricted it to only defined categories I am bound to lose something. Instead, I enjoy the fullness of it by keeping it ill defined and exploring it's multitudes. Perhaps it's simply the case that the answer is "you are missing a human universal" to the question in the topic. If you tried to define humour, analyze jokes, divide them in categories, and extract the hormones triggered in response to some stimuli caused by a certain joke, I would say you did not (on a certain level) understand humour better than a child who made a good joke and enjoy a good laugh. Finale example I heard recently brought up again is Mary's room knowledge argument - no amount of classification of blue, understanding of light spectrum data etc replaces the experience of seeing blue. Likewise with love. To bring it back to your original question about understanding it in order to communicate to others - this is less found in books and more in self exploration through relationships with others. (I speak from perspective of someone in a happy long term romantic relationship with 0 issues and best communication I can imagine, none of which came from books on either of our sides).

Most people and situations don't need more clarity than that for human relationships to progress.

As far as I can tell, a lot of romantic relationships are highly dysfunctional, and it is widely agreed that good communication is vital in a relationship. Given that, I think a lot of people would benefit from thinking more clearly about what love is supposed to be and what they expect from it.

If you mean "most people and situations don't need more clarity than that for human relationships to procreate", then I agree. But I think we can aim higher than that.

1Slapstick
Would you be able to specify a scenario in which the general term for love would lead to dysfunction? I think generally if people want to signal how they feel about someone they're typically able to do so. A lot of dysfunction is caused by people being intentionally ambiguous about the extent and quality and conditions of their feelings. In that way people may hide behind the ambiguity of the word love. Communication helps but I'm not sure if the imprecise nature of the word love is a significant barrier to communication.
1DusanDNesic
I'm not sure - in dissecting the Frog something is lost while knowledge is gained. If you do not see how analysis of things can sometimes (not always!) diminish them, then that may be the crux. I agree with Wbrom above - some things in human experience are irreducible, and sometimes trying to get to a more atomic level means that you lose a lot in the process, in the gaps between the categories.

Is the thing that you are talking about clearly distinct from this thing from my OP?

Love as giving: The drive to protect someone and do stuff for them. (Altruism is a variant of this.)

1RamblinDash
I suppose it's related, but I think maybe I was thrown off by the parenthetical. I perceive it as fundamentally different from altruism. This form of 'love as being on the same team' is also about enjoying your loved ones' successes, seeing them learn and grow and triumph, even if you don't particularly give or protect anything in particular. Because when we're on the same team, their win is my win. 

Most people aren't confused, because they're not trying to be clear and rational.  

It is used to mean a very wide range of positive feelings, and should generally be taken as poetry rather than communication.  

Are you saying that most people only use term love as "poetry" and never when they are trying to be clear? I think this is a strong over-generalization.

Of course people are not always trying to be clear, but the concept of love also appears often when people are doing their best to be clear. In my experience, people will often say things li... (read more)

5Dagon
I think most people have a different conception of what "trying to be clear" means than I do.  They can talk abut true love or what's "really" love, but the very few who actually try to get an operational definition across usually start by tabooing "love" when trying to communicate specific beliefs and experiences (though still using it in more casual, romantic, or poetic settings). I recommend this as a technique when trying to draw out clarity from someone as well.  Don't make them define terms, most people aren't great at the activity of generalizing and re-specifying that language is built on.  Instead, ask them do describe what they mean in this context, by asking for statements that do not use "love".   Note: this rarely leads to kissing.  If that's your goal, I'd advise to delay semantic exploration for another time.

In my experience, when I am tempted to fail with abandon, it has to do with resentment against some rule which I - in that moment at least - consider stifling and unfair. As you also cover in your article about "Should considered harmful".

https://www.lesswrong.com/s/pFatcKW3JJhTSxqAF/p/HqQ3CpMqQyaaLLKew 

I found the opening parts quite interesting.

I found your usage of the terms yin and yang confusing. Skimming the Wikipedia article about it did not help. In my opinion it would help if you would lead with a link to an article that explains yin and yang in the sense you use them and in a relatively concise way. (If such an article exists. If it does not, you might want to consider writing it.)

Likewise the term God. You seem to be using it to refer to something ineffable that you cannot describe adequately. It was not obvious to me that this concept was cohe... (read more)

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