Books (edited to include reasons)
Perfect Health Diet (dense, persuasive, hundreds of citations)
How to Fail at Almost Everything And Still Win Big (its very rational seeming for a self help book, his systems approach is interesting, the book includes some counter arguments to common memes (like questioning the direction of causality in the whole passion/success thing), he mentions other research and memes that will sound familiar to anyone who reads lukeprog self help posts, he assumes he and the readers are moist robots, it's self skeptical and cautious ab...
Agreed, these would be more shareable than lw posts.
I thought you were being a little too fancy with the kinetic style text. The added difficulty in reading it compared to something more linear and clean/minimal was small but enough to make it harder to read it and still watch the illustrations at the same time. That might just be my taste, I am the one asking about attention disorders downthread after all, and I don't want to take away from the fact that it's cool you're actually taking time to do something when it's far more common to just fling ideas out there (which is fine too).
Yeah the question of how we decide what we call legitimate is of interest to me as well. Apparently (according to a wikipedia page that says at the top it needs cleanup) there's some debate over whether SCT is a real disorder, and I'm not sure what the criteria would be among its critics.
I could try phrasing it in a couple of ways: "How justified are we in treating this group of symptoms as a cluster?". Do well accepted symptom clusters like depression point to larger causes, or at least narrow it down to a few possibilities?
Are diagnoses "...
What do you mean with "legitimate"?
A diagnosis of a mental illness is just a clustering of symptoms. There nothing with makes one clustering inherently more "legitimate" than another.
You could call clusters of symptoms published in the DSM-V legitimate if you believe that the authority of the APA can give something legitimacy.
You could also say that tests for diagnosis that have high sensitivity and specificity where different doctors are going to give the same diagnosis, give that diagnosis legitimacy. Non expert diagnosis by someone who reads a Wikipedia page likely doesn't score well for that metric.
Huh, I'm not sure actually, I had been thinking of consequentialism as being the general class of ethical theories based on caring about the state of the world, and that it's utilitarianism when you try to maximize some definition of utility (which could be human value-fulfillment if you tried to reason about it quantitatively). If my usages are unusual I more or less inherited them from the consequentialism faq I think
I don't know if this analogy has been used before but how about: "Intelligence is firepower, rationality is aim." (And the information you have to draw from is ammunition maybe?)
You can draw parallels in terms of precision and consistency, systematically over/undershooting, and it works well with the expression "blowing your foot off"
In middle school I heard a fan theory that Neo had powers over the real world because it was a second layer of the matrix-- the idea of simulations inside simulations was enough for me to come to Bostrom's simulation argument.
Also during the same years I ended up doing an over the top version of comfort zone expansion by being really silly publicly.
In high school I think I basically argued a crude version of compatibilism before learning the term, although my memory of the conversation is a bit vague
This reminds me of the response to the surgeon's dilemma about trust in hospitals. I want to say occupants, because if fear of being sacrificed in trolley problems causes fewer people adopt safer non distractable non fatiguable robot cars then it seems like a net utilitarian loss. If that were not the case, like for example if the safety advantage became overwhelming enough that people bought them anyway, then probably it should just minimize deaths. (I only thought about this for a couple of minutes though)
I get confused when people use language that talks about things like "fairness", or whether people are "deserving" of one thing or another. What does that even mean? And who or what is to say? Is it some kind of carryover from religious memetic influence? An intuition that a cosmic judge decides what people are "supposed" to get? A confused concept people invoke to try to get what they want? My inclination is to just eliminate the whole concept from my vocabulary. Is there a sensible interpretation that makes these words meaningful to atheist/agnostic consequentialists, one that eludes me right now?
Here are some things people might describe as "unfair":
It's not a theistic concept - if anything, it predates theology(some animals have a sense of fairness, for example). We build social structures to enforce it, because those structures make people better off. The details of fairness algorithms vary, but the idea that people shouldn't be cheated is quite common.
t;dr how do you cope with death?
My dog has cancer in his liver and spleen, and learning this has strongly exacerbated some kind of predisposition towards being vulnerable to depression. He's an old dog so it probably wouldn't have changed his life expectancy THAT much, but it's still really sad. If you're not a pet person this might be counterintuitive, but to me it's losing a friend, and the things people say to me are mostly unhelpful. Which is why I'm posting it here specifically: the typical coping memes about doggy heaven or death as some profoundly i... (read more)