All of ama's Comments + Replies

2gjm
You do not understand the relevant area of mathematics. You may rest assured that it will not. However, there are other factors that lead me not to ask you any further questions. I don't think this discussion is achieving anything worth while. Farewell.
2Eliezer Yudkowsky
You need to do more reading of the archives here and on Overcoming Bias before you try commenting here.
2gjm
This is becoming extremely long. I shall try to be brief. Of course I want to know why there are biases such as confirmation bias. (I am aware of some possible explanations, but so far as I know all anyone has is plausible conjectures.) I have seen no evidence that you have any accurate information about that. There are more numbers than words. There are even more integers than words. There aren't more integers than descriptions of integers using words. Whether there are more things than words depends on all sorts of difficult scientific questions and perhaps also on exactly what your definition of "thing" is. I remain unconvinced by your panegyrics about universal love. "I have spoken to tens of thousands of people from all over the world, and they all said so as kids!": then I suggest that you have very strange priorities in what you discuss with them. (Actually, and I hope you aren't offended, I strongly suspect that you are lying or mistaken about this.) "Being in-Love with all words gives us the insight and intuition to know without having any specific info!": ciphergoth was definitely right: you are either entirely unready for, or totally out of sympathy with the aims of, LW, and it is very unlikely that you will either get much benefit from being here or do much good to anyone else here. "Specific example: [...]" You have misunderstood what I was saying, and that is not an example of anything to do with what I was saying. "the brain cannot think without words: music is a word": No. I think you are fond of making confident statements about things you do not understand.
4Paul Crowley
You're not really ready for this site, I'm afraid. Why don't you have a read of some of the posts that brought us here, such as the Twelve Virtues of Rationality, A Technical Explanation of Technical Explanation, or some of these posts on sister site Overcoming Bias and see if what we're doing here is something you can get behind. Sorry!
2gjm
"Bias" here and on OB generally refers to systematic errors in our truth-seeking and decision-making processes. For instance, confirmation bias: we notice evidence in favour of our beliefs much more easily than evidence against. Lots of important things happen in the brain without words. (And, just in case that last sentence is meant to be anything more than a joke: there are obviously far more things than words, though it's not so clear whether or not there are more things than are adequately describable in words.) I would certainly prefer to be loved on such terms than to be hated on such terms, but in general I value someone's love and/or respect more when it is based on who I am and what I am like. Consider a more specific kind of love: would you want to be married to someone who loves you exactly as much as s/he loves everyone else in the world, and whose love is entirely independent of who you are? I am skeptical; do you have any evidence that children spontaneously invent this idea themselves? I think the tradition of saying that is passed down from one child to another, and sometimes from parents to children (I don't believe that adults are completely consistent in not liking it) and the reason is not that there's any truth in it but that it's a good-sounding retort. If you're right then the idea should probably be found roughly equally in all cultures; if I'm right then it should probably be much less common in some cultures. I wonder which of these is so. Perhaps you do, but I don't think you have enough information to know that you do. It seems to me that there is a difference between having the (single, vague, abstract) thought "for all X, I love myself as X" and the (multiple, more specific and concrete) thoughts for all X: "I love myself as X". And while I can imagine (though I remain to be convinced) that the latter might turn out to be helpful in the project of loving one's neighbours, the former seems less relevant; but the latter seems to be w
7gjm
This is not a rationalist origin story, because it is not the story of how you became a rationalist. (It seems fairly clear that in fact you are not a rationalist. This is a description, not a criticism; most people are not rationalists, and manage just fine without being rationalists.) It is also not about "how we can overcome bias", but about how we can (allegedly) overcome one particular failing which is not a bias in the sense that OB is meant to be about. As an account of how one can go about eliminating (perhaps unconscious) hatred for oneself and others, and replacing it with love, it has a severe deficiency: it doesn't actually explain comprehensibly how one can. (Your central idea seems to be that you should love yourself "as" everything, including things you aren't. That seems pretty incoherent to me. You might try to do it by, e.g., imagining yourself in the shoes of everyone you interact with, and that might be an effective way of having a more positive attitude towards them; is that the sort of thing you mean? And you say that by not loving yourself "as" an X, where X is something you aren't, you're thereby hating others. I think that's obviously false.) I think your interpolations into the words of William James and Bertrand Russell change their meanings (James's more than Russell's). Since you appear to be quoting them as authorities, it doesn't seem to me a good sign that you have to change what they're saying to do so. In general, attempts at proselytism are not likely to find an enthusiastic reception here.
4Vladimir_Nesov
Your presentation is impenetrably chaotic.