The terrible habits I had were listed as follows. "Writing for the sound of it" This was later explained as writing the way I talk or writing to sound like speech and eschewing the more visually oriented prose. "Getting into the habit of appealing to the wrong audience." This is a pretty fair criticism and I do admit my style became more academic writing less for popular consumption. I cared less about a clever turn of phrase or a good hook than I cared about fitting the tone set out for the work. This led to the odd an unenviable ...
I'm not sure if this is appropriate but like the original author I am unsure if a CEV is a thing that can be expressed in formal logic even if he brain were fully mapped into a virtual environment. A lot of how we craft our values are based on complex environmental factors that are not easily models. Please read Schall's "Disgust embodied as moral judgement" or J Greene's fMRI Investigation of Emotional Engagement in Moral Judgement. Our values are fluid and Non-Hierarchical . Developing values that have a strict hierarchy , as the OP says can lead to systems which can not change.
I appreciate the comment and there will be no more like this, but what could be done to this to make it good. Please be concrete.
Yes, its from my blog earlier, its a revised version. I'm trying to tell the story of how and why I became a rationalist. Over mini camp I was asked this question many many times. It seems as though everyone had a rational reason for being a rationalist. This struck me as kind of weird because I have no idea how one has rationality before having rationality. Me I came to it irrationally, emotionally. But reversed stupidity is not intelligence. Distrust of the irrational was a cached thought of mine and one that had to be examined, merely distrusting the ir...
Not to get needlessly meta but this is the habit that I had been avoiding and am now breaking using Timeless Decision Theory. http://lesswrong.com/lw/4sh/how_i_lost_100_pounds_using_tdt/ . I used to write every day. I stopped a few years ago when a professor of mine told me it was building and reinforcing bad habits of mine. Since recently leaving academia and going back to being a freelancer I have found myself fearing the specter of the keyboard for anything but the most utilitarian of documents. So while I have kept up my level of production it has been...
I am not an island. There are a few good ways to set up a life of bounded bias or a rational decision about whether or not to engage in bias. I am a social creature and as such am acutely aware that most of my decisions are made as a mix of peer pressure, groupthink, discussions with friends, unconscious reasoning and whatever media I may have managed to digest in the past few hours. I have several friends, one of whom is a dedicated rationalist but a genuinely kind person, his name is Steve I have given him these instructions..::please give me unsolicited...
I would like add, one should write every day and get vicious dispassionate feedback if one wishes to improve. Otherwise you are shouting in an empty canyon for the echo of your own voice.