All of Vichy's Comments + Replies

It's really fascinating to me how someone with a list of Asperger's symptoms can so readily describe a lot of elements in my psychological life.

I have noticed for a long time that I tend to think about all sorts of things other people don't, and that I am just totally confused about other people's emotional responses.

Whether something is a 'cost' or a 'benefit' is itself entirely subjective.

I reject the coherence of neoclassical modeling. I am a definite Misesian in this vein. Predictability and meaningless non-economic situations have nothing to do with the real economy, and have no impact on helping us to understand the real economy (except as counter-factuals, to isolate certain elements, but then they are counter-factuals and ONLY counter-factuals).

I can't stand the stuff I see in the fashion magazines, it's hideous and absurd looking. Fashion models look like someone without depth perception or color vision dressed them. All the stuff I wear tends to be contrasting primary colors (black, red, blue, white) with straight lines of design and minimal labeling. As a consequence, half of my clothes are middle-priced men's clothes.

'Perfect competition' is utter nonsense. Not only is it impossible, there is also nothing intrinsically desireable about it.

And Pareto-Superior conditions are also nonsense. There is no non-arbitrary way to compare utilities of separate actors. What makes someone 'better' or 'worse' off is entirely subjective, and not at all subject to arithmetic comparison or external validation/invalidation.

There's no point in power if you don't exploit it for personal benefit. Cops are annoying, but they don't bother me on some sort of existential level.

I find it virtually impossible to be offended by anything. The very concept of 'being offended' seems to indicate something of an ego-blow, or a status-puncture.

I would say it basically comes down to the fact that abstract rationality is slow and requires lots of processing power. For the same reasons we can usually only mentally afford to employ a certain limited set of fairly abstracted terms, and can only follow the implications of this to a limited degree. If we were all Kryptonians it would probably be pretty functionally rational to stay in 'far mode' all the time, but as the squishy, dumb bugs we are a lot of our functional capacity derives from various habitual and patterned behaviour. Far mode mostly s... (read more)

"Excluding people for reasons unrelated to these goals, such as susceptibility to social pressure, is suboptimal because potential gains scale with the number of people you interact with." It's quite the other way around - people who strongly conform to social pressure tend to be people who I will disagree with so much in theory and practice that I have no desire to attempt any sort of relationship. I find people who get 'offended', or care about 'animal rights', are far more likely to make me want to punch them than to contribute anything I hav... (read more)

Well, I wouldn't say that women can not wear clothes that men find attractive/unattractive, or otherwise interesting. But I know from conversations that many men consider a good majority of what women wear to be pointless and stupid looking. All the guys I know are practically offended by those baby-doll dress, or stuff like shoes with bows on them.

I have to agree. I mean, I like dressing up, but there is definite limit of like an hour which I will not go beyond. If an hour of work can't make you look good, no amount of time will.

I'm residing in the northwest USA. Pretty much all of my friends are males. No, literally all of them.

It seems to me a lot of this has to be female-female signaling as proposed. Most men do not seem to care what I'm wearing, and would probably prefer it was 'nothing'. I have NEVER had a guy bring up something I'm wearing unless it was clearly being used as an opening for chatting me up.

"What are you, a Randian?" Certainly not. I'm just amoral and not very keen on some of the typical elements of our primate tribalisms. On top of that, I think most people's social 'problems' are self-inflicted.

"In my experience, most people aren't' 'whiners', though that might be subjective." By 'whiner' I mean simply what I said above. It's not someone else's fault you get offended or otherwise react emotionally, that's your deal. If you can do something about it, do so. If not - what of it? Obviously if the other person thought ... (read more)

Because it's easy enough to ignore people who bore me, and there are a handful of you on here who are worth interacting with. What's more, sometimes 'normal' people do produce something worth reading, I just wouldn't want to share an apartment with them.

'Suboptimal' for what? There is no such thing as 'general efficiency', success and failure (and their degress) are meaningless without an actual framework of goals and preference. I simply do not enjoy socially interacting with people like that. I am aware that this includes most of the human race. I happen to find most of the human race useless beyond the buy-sell relationship.

Not at all, as this isn't something specific to women. I think most people are 'whiners' who complain as though somebody owed them something. They do not. Not appreciation, not respect, not deference, not friendship, not the time of day. People who get 'offended' because someone didn't say what THEY wanted, or because someone doesn't care about their feelings just annoy me.

Well, I don't very much care about those sorts of people. It's not that I have any desire to aggravate them, but they're usually useless to me as anything but vending machines.

Despite being female, I generally find I could not give a damn about alleged 'social' pressures on women, since people who get all weepy because everyone doesn't treat them nice are (in my opinion) laughable, regardless of their sex.

"Comments and posts that casually objectify women or encourage the objectification of women. " Human beings ARE objects. All of them. Whatever an 'autonomous being is', if it exists it is still an object in both the grammatical and ontological sense. I objectify everyone, and it seems absurd not to.

"If you nee... (read more)

* we recognize that the optimal long-term strategy can differ greatly from the optimal one-shot analysis, and
* we have preferences about some anticipated world-states rather than just anticipated mind-states.

In response to this I say there is nothing about subjectivist satisfaction which prevents taking these (or anything else) into consideration. Further, I do not mean this in a utility-function sense, but rather 'actual wants derived from valuation forecasts which result in intentionality'.

The point isn't whether robots (or people) could be affected by cardinal magnitudes. The point is that only the valuation which causes action in the subjective present (Bergsonian present) actually motivates people. How they come to have that value might be predictable by direct cardinal ratios (indeed, if you're a mental determinist and materialist this is true of humans). The point is that this psychological or physiological fact is the origin of a particular motivation. Teleological entities, however, only feel and act right now, and only on their m... (read more)

Sorry for the delay, I just checked this: I think actual morality tends to systematically bias behaviour and ideas about 'social' life which are contrary to fact and create all sorts of personal and interpersonal problems. I also think it gives far too strong a 'presumption' towards the benevolence of do-gooders, the sanity of 'sticking to your guns, come what may' and the wisdom of the popular.

There is a more general problem with cognitive dissonance and idea-consistency, due to the literal nonsensicality of most moral claims and sentiments. I also see ... (read more)

As a moral nihilist and/or egoist I tend to agree with the general sentiment of this article, though I would not take the tack of saying morality needs to be reformed - it's so nonsensical and grinding it may be as possible (and more beneficial) to simply stop pretending magical rules and standards need apply.

"Utility functions are really bad match for human preferences, and one of the major premises we accept is wrong." Given the sheer messiness and mechanical influence involved in human brains, it's not even clear we have real 'values' which could be examined on a utility function, rather than simple dominant-interestedness that happens for largely unconscious and semi-arbitrary reasons.

"A basketball player finding the shortest path through the opposition to the net will probably epic fail if s/he does not follow his/her feelings, or tries to think. " Well, yes, I wouldn't want to rule out the efficacy of unconscious calculations; trying to use vectors to calculate how to catch a frisbee is likely to be unsucessful. Conscious rationcination is resource intensive and slow.

Where is is bad advice is when people use these processes as a substitute for rationcination; forming of abstract theories on the basis of emotional pleasantness is unlikely to render accurate beliefs. Of course, accuracy isn't everything.

"If it is possible for an agent - or, say, the human species - to have an infinite future, and you cut yourself off from that infinite future and end up stuck in a future that is merely very large, this one mistake outweighs all the finite mistakes you made over the course of your existence." Doesn't this arbitrarily favor future events? But future-self isn't current-self, it's literally a different person. Distinguishing between desirable outcomes is tautological, your values precede evaluation.

Wouldn't it be easier if we just admitted to ourselves that much of what we do is to get attention, when we were actually doing them? Of course I want attention from people, I wouldn't talk to them otherwise.

It's also easier to avoid rationalization if you don't even attempt to provide normative justification (I believe normative justification is essentially circular reasoning).

I would say the direction I most dissent from Less Wrong is that I don't think 'rationality' is inherently anything worth having. It's not that I doubt its relevance for developing more accurate information, nor its potential efficacy in solving various problems, but if I have a rationalistic bent that is mainly because I'm just that sort of person - being irrational isn't 'bad', it's just - irrational.

I would say the sort of terms and arguments I most reject are those with normative-moral content, since (depending on your definition) I either do not beli... (read more)

"Things like Star Trek and Tolkien are incredibly powerful for very small subsets of the population because their creators make risky aesthetic and narrative choices." I would say there is some truth to this, for example I don't mind diplomacy scenes that take up 2/3rds of the episode since I'm an exposition sort-of person to begin with, but a lot of people really hate that.

I feel that most good fiction is internally consistent since that's sort of definitionally necessary of actually having a plot. But many people seem to read things that satisfy their emotional biases; rather than to follow a coherent narrative.

"What are the prejudices in Star Wars or Star Trek?" Star Trek is uber yuppy social democrat space, and Star Wars has an extremely predictable plot with unbelievable magic elements and exactly the sort of bad advice people love (follow your feelings, stop trying to think; our Enemies are Pure Evil).

"And so the fan groups of Tolkien, Star Trek, Spider-man, Japanese kiddie-cartoons etc. develop an almost cult-like character." I like some of all of these examples, and I agree there are horrible, asinine elements to all of them. They all have ludicrous philosophical positions, arbitrary physics, inane plots and villains with motivations that manage to be incoherent and predictable at the same time. Although I've seen every episode of every series of Star Trek before Enterprise, I have to say I spend most of my time watching it making fun of t... (read more)