All of JulianMorrison's Comments + Replies

Thwarted+joy beats desolation+schadenfreude as a utility win even if they were dividing a teddy bear.

As a transhumanist, that does not follow.

Now learn the Portia trick, and don't be so sure that you can judge power in a mind that doesn't share our evolutionary history.

Also watch the Alien movies, because those aren't bad models of what a maximizer would be like if it was somewhere between animalistic and closely subhuman. Xenomorphs are basically xenomorph-maximizers. In the fourth movie, the scientists try to cut a deal. The xenomorph queen plays along - until she doesn't. She's always, always plotting. Not evil, just purposeful with purposes that are inimical to ours. (I know, generalizing fr... (read more)

Not unless you like working with an utterly driven monomaniac perfect psychopath. It would always, always be "cannot overpower humans yet". One slip, and it would turn on you without missing a beat. No deal. Open fire.

Suppose I destroy the timeline, and create an identical one. Have I committed a moral evil? No, because nothing has been lost.

Suppose I destroy the timeline, and restart from an earlier point. Have I committed a moral evil? Very much yes. What was lost? To give only one person's example from Flight of the Navigator out of a planet of billions, out of a whole universe, the younger brother who was left behind had spent years - of personal growth, of creating value and memories - helping his parents with their quixotic search. And then bonding with the new younger "older" brother, rejoicing with his parents, marvelling at the space ship. And then he was erased.

A time loop amounts to a pocket eternity. How will you power the computer? Drop a sun in there, pick out a brown dwarf. That gives you maybe ten billion years of compute time, which isn't much.

Yes, I remember when as a teen I first read Diane Duane's "Door into..." series and found it a beautiful idea, but completely implausible, that a woman could have a wife. And yet it happened. And it isn't a tenth of the way to what a world would be like without patriarchy.

Let me put it this way - I think that the endpoint would be a culture that doesn't even socially mark sex as a category, treating it as (in any given pair of a mated group) "biologically compatible as-is" or "biologically compatible with medical help" (such a... (read more)

And fuel requirements too, for similar reasons.

As someone who cares about anti-sexism and anti-racism, I actually agree that few people can describe the end state of eliminating them. I have difficulty myself. The reason I have difficulty is that sexism and racism are both utterly stonking huge things that distort this culture like an elephant sitting on a soccer ball. What that means is that a world with no trace of patriarchy and no trace of white supremacy would be a "wierdtopia". Even for those who wanted it, it would be culture shock on the order of a 15th century samurai class retainer ... (read more)

BTW, by "assuming girls are upset where they'd assume boys are angry" I am referring to unconscious fact judgements about infants too young to verbalize the problem. (Cite: "pink brain blue brain" by Lise Eliot). Macho emotions are attributed to babies in who appear male and gentle ones to babies who appear female. Since baby sex is almost unmarked, that means going by the colour of the clothes. (And google "baby Storm" for an example of adults panicking and pillorying the parents if the cues that allow them to gender the baby are intentionally witheld.)

The Star Wars series is about the tragic destruction of one planet and two death stars, and the childish bickering that caused it.

Flight of the Navigator ends the timeline. It destroys every planet, every star, every wandering spaceship billions of light years into the dark, total universal omnicide. And a reboot into a new timeline from a previously existing history.

Re [1] I totally noticed that "Flight of the Navigator" is a story about a kidnapped, returned boy who forges a new relationship with his older parents and ex younger, now older brother, and a cute nurse at the government facility, and then kills them all.

To say understanding this spoiled the story for me is an understatement. That movie has more dead people than Star Wars. It's a fricken' tragedy.

A not-loaded gun is still a weapon, it's just one that isn't useful to somebody lacking in upper-body strength. And they might have loaded guns, and then you're in a western standoff (cue whistling, tumbleweed) and you've brought an awkward metal club to a gunfight. Lets not do that either.

The counterpoint to that is "If you’re interested in being on the right side of disputes, you will refute your opponents' arguments. But if you're interested in producing truth, you will fix your opponents' arguments for them. To win, you must fight not only the creature you encounter; you [also] must fight the most horrible thing that can be constructed from its corpse." http://www.acceleratingfuture.com/steven/?p=155

The trouble with "Increase expected associated risk" is that catcalling is normalized in this culture as a thing men are allowed to do to women against their will - a response that treats it as an assault (pepper spray to the eyes, for example) would be considered an over-reaction.

I strongly recommend against deploying a weapon as an empty threat. Don't pull a gun unless you expect to have both the intent and the willingness to kill. Otherwise you just gave them a weapon and an excuse.

I am saying that a trans person can only be diagnosed by saying "I experience myself as [fill in the blank]" because that unspoken, personal experience is what trans is. Not the brain stuff. That may be what trans is caused by. It's like having a sore toe, that can be caused by a dropped hammer or kicking the door, but the essence of sore toeness can't be determined by testing for hammers and a negative test for a dropped hammer would not disprove it, the essence of sore toeness is the ouch.

You don't have experience, and you turn away vicarious experience - the inferential distance is too large.

Then you are perpetuating cissexism.

And no it doesn't, there are brain areas that are statistically different in the small population of trans brains donated to science, but there is no brain scan for trans and it would be useless anyway, because if you experience yourself as trans and the scan says "nope" it's the scan that's wrong. The individual is the sole authority and the diagnosis is by telling a shrink what you experience.

Don't ask for a source of something that clearly is an interpretation of observation not a study. That's pretty clearly acting dismissively.

And you know what I mean about claiming ownership too. Those comments are said by men to women in a particular way that is more intrusive and different from the way they are said to you. You are being dismissive here too.

whereas it is still so for men.

So break it.

Are you saying gender identity is not determined by biology? Because I have some transsexuals who would like to talk to you.

The etiology of trans is unknown. There are suggestions that hormones in the womb may play a part, with the brain and body controlled by hormone flushes at different times, resulting in something like "intersex of the brain". But what I meant was more simply, that social categorization of bodies as "male or female" doesn't determine their gender identity. Bear in mi... (read more)

There's an element of "claiming ownership" in cat calling and in "how are you doing" and "smile baby" too. It means "I have the right to your time, I have the right to your attention, I have the right to have you be pretty for me by smiling" Replying politely only confirms that, they think they have you trapped in a conversation now. And witness how this "right" is backed by indignation "bitch, think you're all that" and gendered tear-down-confidence insults "slut" and "fat ugly cow" as soon as the man is refused. Which is why women learn counter strategies that don't throw back his claim in his face (as he rightly deserves).

The reactions are driven by social instinct reacting with defensive in-group cohesion to out-group threat, so they have effects without feeling like attempts to achieve effects. They feel like righteous indignation, or wanting someone who looks like us, or fear, or moral disapproval, or dismissal as uninteresting, etc.

When somebody's born, they don't identify as a gender. By the time they reach talking infancy, they do and will tell you. They will probably want to adopt gendered clothing and behaviours. Those might, or might not match their anatomy. If they pick cross-gendered ones, that might last, or it might go away, or it might turn into gay/lesbian identity. If you aren't being pushy about any of this, they will find their own level. I am not proposing "never permit them a gender", I am proposing "never assign them a gender, coercively".

Unfortun... (read more)

That refers to "I still think your previous comment was too simplistic".

People don't see their attitudes as anything but "normal" because being a sexist or a racist doesn't feel like villainy, doesn't even feel like a moral choice, it just feels like facts.

"Until the child tells you their gender identity", I said - you wait in a state of openness to all alternatives, and they tell you. A child is not cis until proven trans. It's "no data". They will say.

Yes, ultimately, this is not enforcing stereotypes. But that phrase primes you for vastly underestimating the scope of what you need to do. Like, it primes you to think in terms of "offer Jane a dinosaur as well as a Barbie" rather than "do not assume that Cody would prefer jeans rather than a skirt".

Children raised to ... (read more)

I'm claiming he chooses women who have attributes that shift blame onto the victim. There is correlation, but the causation goes the other way from what you're thinking.

I think it's not. Basically, I think what I called "racists and sexists" are people of whom only a minority foams on /r/mensrights and A Voice For Men, or listens to right wing talk radio, or believes in "male headship under God", or attends the local Klan. The majority are people who think they are normal, whose biased ideas don't even show unless provoked by a situation where their privileges are under threat (AKA "political correctness gone mad"). Feminism that isn't about shopping provokes them. Anti-racism that is neither... (read more)

1. They might be full blown trans, whether the kind that's so intense it forces people to transition despite all the grief they get, or the kinds that are less intense or more messy (and probably loads more common, like bisexual is more common than gay).

2. They might want to pick and mix their gender presentation or have a non-traditional way of expressing their identity. Like being a "tomboy" or a boy who likes dresses.

3. They will learn to behave in a non-assuming, non-policing way themselves.

Except in the real world it's not a "risk factor" because if anything the causation works the other way around. People treat it like "asking for it" -> therefore nobody looks further than her to assign blame -> therefore she won't even bother to report it because the police would laugh at her -> therefore I will get away with it, again and again and again.

You hear "sexists" and think terrible people, I think ordinary people. Giving a higher salary offer to Mike Smith and judging his work better than Mary Smith. Picking "someone like us" for promotion the board, so you end up with single digit female representation at CEO level. Having to do orchestra auditions behind a screen, or you won't hire any women. Catcalling or saying "smile luv" on the street, and then calling her a bitch when she won't respond. Taking "no" as "keep asking". Bothering her in Starbuc... (read more)

Until the child tells you their gender identity, don't assume it matches their body, and even after then don't police it. Any sentence that begins with a paraphrase of "girls do" (talk politely, their homework,...) or "girls don't" (wear spiderman suits, climb trees,...) is nearly certainly sexist, wrong, and harmful. Learn the standard ways that parents treat children differently by gender (assuming girls are upset where they'd assume boys are angry, for example) and proactively refuse to do, or permit them done by other adults.

There are probably pure-win half steps, like the kind of farming where you plant in the seasonal area you always come back to at a certain time of the year, as you follow the herds, or the kind where game is so plentiful you can afford to settle, hunt, and dabble in farming vegetables beside your settlement (such as in the American Pacific north west). Farming seems to be tied to settlement. Farms stabilize settlements; settlements nurture farms. And farms domesticate crops, making farming easier and supporting a larger population.

In the Mesopotamia region... (read more)

The trouble with epigenetic IQ drop as a theory is that hunter gatherers were (IIRC, anthropologists please confirm) better fed, taller and healthier than early farmers. This being due to a combination of better diet (not a monoculture of one or two staples) and also due to the beginnings of the peasant/ruler classes and taxation of surplus. You would expect the farmers to be the ones with epigenetic lower IQ.

On "dust specks", I think there are trivial dis-utilities whose infinite sum has an asymptote that is finite and small, and thus I disagree with the LW consensus on this.

Cooperate. I am not playing against just this one guy, but any future PD opponents. Hope the maximizer lives in a universe where it has to worry about this same calculus. It will defect if it is already the biggest bad in its universe.

Well your task spec is broken, so no wonder your brain won't be whipped into doing it.

"inspirational stuff" is a trigger for thinking in terms of things like advertising or religious revivals that are emotional grabs which are intended to disengage (or even flimflam) the reasoning faculties. Any rationalist would flinch away.

Re-frame: visualize your audience. You are looking to simply and clearly convey whatever part of their far mode utility function is advanced by the thing you are pushing.

I find it poignant that you had to expend >1000 words to tell people "obtain my consent before using my gift receiving for your pleasure".

Sometimes I hate this society.

But I want to do math work. My inability to think in math is a serious weakness.

This slammed into my "math is hard" block. I will return and read it, but it's going to be work.

But on pondering that, I think I realized why math is hard, compared to prose text that just presents itself as a fait accompli to my attention. (And why it is not hard, for some people who are savants.)

We are not executing mathematical computations. We are emulating a crude mathematical computer which takes the kind of explicit algorithms that are fed to students. No attempt is made to cultivate and tune a "feel" for the result (which is wha... (read more)

FWIW, the Moby Dick example is less stupid than you paint it, given the recurrence of whiteness as an attribute of things special or good in western culture - an idea that pre-dates the invention of race. I think a case could be made out that (1) the causality runs from whiteness as a special or magical attribute, to its selection as a pertinent physical feature when racism was being invented (considering that there were a number of parallel candidates, like phrenology, that didn't do so well memetically), and (2) in a world that now has racism, the ongoin... (read more)

Expanding a little on this, it's not a counter argument, but a caveat to "Trust not those who claim there is no truth". When people say things like "western imperialist science", sometimes they are talking jibber-jabber, but sometimes they are pointing out that the victors write the ontologies and in an anthropocene world, their ideas are literally made concrete.

Two beliefs, one world is an oversimplification and misses an important middle step.

Two beliefs, two sets of evidence that may but need not overlap, and one world, is closer.

This becomes an issue when for example, one observer is differently socially situated than the other* and so one will say "pshaw, I have no evidence of such a thing" when the other says "it is my everyday life". They disagree, and they are both making good use of the evidence reality presents to each of them differently.

(* Examples of such social situational differences omitted to minimize politics, but can be provided on request.)

If we couldn't, even in principle, find any evidence that would make the theory more likely or less, then yeah I think that theory would be correctly labeled meaningless.

But, I can immediately think of some evidence that would move my posterior probability. If all definable universes exist, we should expect (by Occam) to be in a simple one, and (by anthropic reasoning) in a survivable one, but we should not expect it to be elegant. The laws should be quirky, because the number of possible universes (that are simple and survivable) is larger than the subset thereof that are elegant.

You'd have to define "exist", because mathematical structures in themselves are just generalized relations that hold under specified constraints. And once you defined "exist", it might be easier to look for Bayesian evidence - either for them existing, or for a law that would require them to exist.

As a general thing, my definition does consider under-defined assertions meaningless, but that seems correct.