All of _ozymandias's Comments + Replies

It's Mary Daly, Catholic theologian and radical feminist: http://www.enlightennext.org/magazine/j16/daly.asp?pf=1

I don't believe that that quite applies to my situation. I'm not predicting whether I'll choose right now to break up with my girlfriend (99.999% certainty I won't); I'm predicting whether at some point in the next year one of the future Ozymandiases, subtly different from me, will find zirself in a state in which zie wants to break up with zir girlfriend. I have already made up my mind to not break up; I'm predicting how likely I am to change my mind.

I hope that the cynicism I reject in my own self-examination of my membership in my own church of rational physics engineering leads me to reject cynicism when trying to understand other people's churches. There ARE reasons people believe things and they are by no means all stupid reasons.

We're definitely in agreement there. And even the ones that are stupid may be psychologically reassuring or otherwise "make sense" even if they are completely irrational. While signalling arguments are important, I think it's unrealistic to consider them to the exclusion of other arguments.

I was thinking roughly Matrix 2 level backlash: a significant group of "ruined FOREVER" fans, but the movie does not become a byword for terribleness now and forever like Episode 1. Possibly this could be measured by the number of negative YMMV tropes on its TVTropes page?

Fan backlash is remarkably difficult to operationalize.

Sorry. I apparently suck at the Internet. :)

noseriouslywhatabouttehmenz.wordpress.com

No death or rape threats. I have yet to come up with a theory about why (beyond "crazy random happenstance" and "I'm so nice no one wants to rape and murder me"); suggestions appreciated.

Thanks! LW actually helped me crystallize that a lot of the stuff social-justice-types talk about is not some special case of human evil, but the natural consequence of various cognitive biases (that, in this case, serves to disadvantage certain types of people).

Dammit, could someone clean the fanboy off the ceiling? The goop is getting in my hair. :)

It is true, I forgot to account for the effects of a GOP presidency on OWS. However, I still think there's a high chance of a OWS fadeaway for a few reasons. One, the liberal hippies (generally the backbone of social justice movements) have started to nitpick OWS in earnest: this could be a sign either that OWS is getting more successful (and the crab in a bucket mentality is taking over) or that it's losing their support, but given that the mainstream media seems to have decided OWS is yesterday's news, I think it might be the latter. Second, as the econo... (read more)

To a certain degree, different brands of feminism could function as different parties (certainly in academic feminism they do). A Christina-Hoff-Sommers-esque conservative feminist is unlikely to agree much with a Dworkinite radical feminist. For instance, "rape is a subset of violence with no particularly gendered component" and "rape is the natural outgrowth of a culture in which women's subordination to men is eroticized" are two substantially different positions (both of which I disagree with).*

Admittedly, the average person is not... (read more)

The difference in my reaction when reading this post before and after I found my something to protect is rather remarkable. Before, it was well-written and interesting, but fundamentally distinct from my experience-- rather like listening to people talk about theoretical physics. Now, when I read it, my feeling of determination is literally physical. It's quite odd.

Has anyone else had a similar experience?

I'm already polyamorous, so there is in fact a certainty of a polyamorous relationship situation at some point in 2012. :)

My girlfriend knows and is highly amused at my pessimism.

My logic is that I have never actually had a relationship that went much beyond the six-month mark, and while there are all kinds of factors that mean that this one is different and will stand the test of time, all of my other relationships also had all kinds of factors that meant this one is different and will stand the test of time.

The prediction is only 60%, however, since I might have actually gotten better at relationships since the last go-round. And because my girlfriend is really fucking awesome. :)

Romney will be the Republican presidential nominee: 80%.

Obama will win reelection: 90%.with a non-Romney presidential nominee, 50% against Romney

The Occupy Wall Street protests will fade away over the next year so much that I no longer hear much about them, even in my little liberal hippie news bubble: 75%

There will be massive fanboy backlash against The Hobbit: 80%. Despite this, the Hobbit will be a pretty good movie (above 75% on Rotten Tomatoes): 70%

John Carter will be a pretty good movie (above 75% on Rotten Tomatoes). 85% Whether or not it is a good ... (read more)

Thank you for the link to the Chalmers article: it was quite interesting and I think I now have a much firmer grasp on why exactly there would be an intelligence explosion.

The second is that consciousness is not necessarily even related to the issue of AGI, the AGI certainly doesn't need any code that tries to mimick human thought. As far as I can tell, all it really needs (and really this might be putting more constraints than are necessary) is code that allows it to adapt to general environments (transferability) that have nice computable approximations it can build by using the data it gets through it's sensory modalities (these can be anything from something familiar, like a pair of cameras, or something less so like a

Before I ask these questions, I'd like to say that my computer knowledge is limited to "if it's not working, turn it off and turn it on again" and the math I intuitively grasp is at roughly a middle-school level, except for statistics, which I'm pretty talented at. So, uh... don't assume I know anything, okay? :)

How do we know that an artificial intelligence is even possible? I understand that, in theory, assuming that consciousness is completely naturalistic (which seems reasonable), it should be possible to make a computer do the things neurons... (read more)

Very few people know what career they want when they're seventeen. Of those people, a significant proportion end up either doing a different job or displeased by their choice.

This is what I did; it may or may not work for you. Go to a college with a wide variety of class choices and highlight everything in the course book that looks interesting and that you have the prereqs for. Narrow it down to four or five classes by eliminating courses that occur in the same time block as another course you're more interested in, courses with dull or unintelligent te... (read more)

I think many people will assume that "literature thread" also means "book thread," since "literature" is often used to mean "book, with connotations of being worthwhile/classic/making you a better person/whatever."

Perhaps "media" would work? Although that almost presents the opposite problem...

I'd suggest that high-cost ideas are generally high-benefit, or at least high-apparent-benefit (see: love-bombing in cults), in order to incentivize people to believe them.

I definitely think it's important to recognize that almost all group beliefs are both signalling and something that people actually believe and that has effects on their life. The PhD's role as a signal of membership in the Physicist Conspiracy doesn't conflict with the PhD's role of learning interesting things about physics; in fact, they're complementary. (However, it's certainly possi... (read more)

Interesting article!

I presume that "I realized this goal was irrational and switched to a different goal that would better achieve my values" would also be a victory for instrumental rationality...

Ah, thank you. I misunderstood. :) I've had a few problems with people being confused about why my blog uses so much feminist dogma if it's a men's rights blog, so I'm hyper-sensitive about being mistaken for a non-feminist.

Thank you very much, Miley! I tend to view feminism and men's rights as being inherently complementary: in general, if we make women more free of oppressive gender roles, we will tend to make men more free of oppressive gender roles, and vice versa. However, in the great football game of feminists and men's rights advocates, I'm pretty much on Team Feminism, which is why I get so upset when it's clearly doing things wrong.

Also, my pronoun is zie, please. :)

To a certain degree one could test instrumental rationality indirectly. Perhaps have them set a goal they haven't made much progress on (dieting? writing a novel? reducing existential risk?) and see if instrumental rationality training leads to more progress on the goal. Or give people happiness tests before and a year after completing the training (i.e. when enough time has passed that the hedonic treadmill has had time to work). Admittedly, these indirect methods are incredibly prone to confounding variables, but if averaged over a large enough sample size the trend should be clear.

I think the most important thing about a rationality training service is operationalizing what is meant by rationality.

What exact services would the rationality training service provide? Would students have beliefs that match reality better? Be less prone to cognitive biases? Tend to make decisions that promote greater utility (for themselves or others)? How would you test this? Martial arts dojos tend to (putting it crudely) make their students better at hitting things than they were before; that's a lot easier to objectively measure than making students... (read more)

I think the distinction is not between logical and illogical ideas, but between high-cost and low-cost ideas.

Illogical ideas are generally high-cost, for the reasons outlined in the OP, unless you live in a society in which everyone accepts the high-cost idea (for instance, Creationism in the American South). Cryonics is a high-cost idea: it may be right, but it is also deeply weird and unlikely to find acceptance among non-transhumanists. PhD physicists have high-cost ideas because of the time and effort required to understand them. Even jargon might coun... (read more)

l'd like a separate Less Wrong readthrough because I don't have a Reddit account and don't want to acquire one for the sole purpose of the readthrough (because then I'll comment on Reddit, and I have quite enough time-wasting things to do on the Internet already :) ).

Where are you? I'm in Fort Lauderdale and the Tampa area. If we're near each other maybe we could arrange one of those meetup thingies...

I'm another classic brilliant-at-age-ten kid. The biggest problem I experienced related to being considered smart rather young was that a lot of my sense of self-worth got tied up in being the smartest kid in the room. This is suboptimal-- not only does it lead to the not asking stupid questions issue, but it also means that as soon as I was in a situation in which I wasn't smart about something, I felt like I had no worth as a human being whatsoever. (Possible confounding variable: I had depression.)

The closest thing to a solution I've found is to try to ... (read more)

Hi everyone! I'm Ozy.

I'm twenty years old, queer, poly, crazy, white, Floridian, an atheist, a utilitarian, and a giant geek. I'm double-majoring in sociology and psychology; my other interests range from classical languages (although I am far from fluent) to guitar (although I suck at it) to Neil Gaiman (I... can't think of a self-deprecating thing to say about my interest in Neil Gaiman). I use zie/zir pronouns, because I identify outside the gender binary; I realize they're clumsy, but English's lack of a good gender-neutral pronoun is not my fault. :) ... (read more)