Then again, I sometimes feel as if I'm one-eyed, saying "I understand how having two eyes would be better, but is it really necessary?"
You know, discovering LessWrong forced me to reconsider exactly this. I mean, the "you don't know what you're missing if you never had it" argument never seemed wrong before LW, just annoying.
Realistically, if a cheap and quick-to-heal eye repair/replacement method became available tomorrow, I can only try to imagine how my brain would respond to a random extra input. And depth perception sounds like some terrifying mindscrew, and what is this business about eye-crossing and seeing double? And I am a wee bit worried about what having... (read more)
I've heard the phrase "disability markup" used to describe how almost everything ever targeted toward physical or sensory disabilities are absurdly expensive. That name implies more intentional malice than I expect is at work; I'd generally round off to "market forces"--it's difficult to take advantage of mass market capitalism when selling to a minority, but it is possible to take advantage of government assistance programs.
It seems like, though, based on my (very limited) understanding of hearing aids, a charitable version of "disability markup" might be closer to reality. After all, if it's treating a disability, especially one found in old people, either those who need it are going to be rich... (read more)
No, I'm afraid of the witch-hunters. (So far, polling indicates that this was not the right hypothesis for the commentary in general.) I avoided commenting until my previous comment because I was pretty sure I'd regret it--probably missing the point or getting drawn into the political deluge--and it seems this was the correct expectation.
Five years ago
Five years ago, we weren't just coming down from a spree of witch-hunts in which online mobs destroy people's lives for being insufficiently politically correct. I suspect lots of "be on the look out for anything that looks sexist" conditioning still hasn't worn off. But I might be mind-projecting.
Actually, it seems worth a poll. did/did not take it as something close to rape apologia, are/are not worried about doxing or other such harassment campaigns?
[pollid:1126]
Perhaps instead of "divorced from", I should have said "adversarial to"?
Or maybe I should have just left it at "adversarial" and not bothered bringing up the relation to reality at all.
I was thinking of a specific comment I wrote multiple replies to before successfully restraining myself with the realization that it was blatant flame-bait. I do not claim that the basic point ("groups x y and z produce fewer successful people on average than groups u v and w", and "mediocre success gets signal-boosted among disadvantaged groups") is false. I do claim that the way the_lion conducted himself during the discussion rapidly stopped including a willingness to engage with facts or use enough clarity to make some of his claims falsifiable, and the phrasing implied a deliberate attempt to provoke outrage (which I should note was mostly avoided; it is regrettable that a couple people succumbed to the temptation anyway.)
I'd certainly grant that you could well be correct in your impressions. After all, it's odd for him to go from this to this week's spree of what looks a lot like trolling, seemingly over getting a rule against his voting strategies enforced.
It wasn't so much the racism, as the completely assinine, dogmatic, insulting-to-everyone-involved, divorced-from-reality manner in which he went about it. At least his previous incarnations didn't sound like a Klansman got drunk and decided to go trolling (Heck, some of his stuff in his original form was downright reasonable, and when it wasn't, he still came across as the more rational person in the conversation at times, even if you disagreed with his conclusions).
He was originally banned for abusing the voting system to try and remove his political opponents from the conversation. So far as I could tell, his next two bans were because he could not resist doing the same thing.... (read more)
I understand QI as related to the Anthropic Principal. The point is that you will tend to find yourself observing things, which implies that there is an effectively immortal version of you somewhere in probability space. It doesn't require that any Quantum Immortals coexist in the same world.
Of course, we'd be far more likely to continue observing things in a world where immortality is already available than in one where it is not, but since we're not in that world, it doesn't seem too outlandish to give a little weight to the idea that the absence of Quantum Immortals is a precondition to being a Quantum Immortal. I have no idea how... (read more)
I read things like "Rationality should win!", and I feel validated. That's basically what I've believed as far back as I can remember (and though my memory isn't as reliable as I'd like, I do think it is pretty decent, based on comparisons I've made with video evidence. Not that said video evidence includes much of me talking about my beliefs.).
Yet, clearly, I am no master of rationality, given that my situation at present is not what I would define as having won. When my father was my age, he was employed, married (to his second wife, with whom he is still married), and I was three years old. It wasn't... (read 1279 more words →)
Obvious advice is obvious because it works, yes. The background assumption is that it is all implementable without further advice-wanting requirements. Advice for building a kickass gaming PC in 2017 with secure income and access to the internet will be simpler than the same advice adapted for 1950, because PCs were not available in 1950, the internet did not exist, and computers were huge, slow, and low on storage capacity as compared to 2000, never mind 2017.
Of course, if this could be fully generalized to all contexts, it would likely have been done by now. It's not practical to account for every outlier when responding to a general audience, and even to an individual without extraordinary circumstances (such as being paid as a therapist/life-coach/etc). This is where generalized instrumental rationality should take over, and yet, signs seem to point toward GIR being much harder than ... eh, just about everything short of implementing Utopiae, I guess.