All of kilgoar's Comments + Replies

New mental models are resisted with the most extreme passion, even by those who know better.

For example, there is a conceit among most folks alive today that the present is quite a lot better, more progressed, more humane than the distant, "dark" past. The facts of history show this idea to be in many ways  false and in others misleading. Most of what we associate with ancient or medieval irrationality and stupidity, particularly persecutions like the witch craze, indeed begin to ramp up during the early modern period and continue to do so into the ab... (read more)

What you are describing as the "aristocratic system," I think better called the Feudal arrangements, continued later into the industrial period most famously in the American South, where large estates were becoming increasingly economically viable with the combination of slave labor and mechanized processing of cotton. Some old world cultural expressions of medieval chivalry not only had persisted there but were becoming more popular, with a craze for dueling, a deadly menace mentioned repeatedly in the press. In spite of the aristocratic cultural vigor an... (read more)

There's no need to strain a metaphor beyond its good use. The intuition pump as a surprise taste test could be more, a moral allegory as you've had it, but that's the very kind of narrative thread-weaving which I wanted to warn against.

What I want to emphasize most of all, and I'll be more direct and less clever now, is playfulness over minmaxing. Making and stockpiling increasing amounts of bows, ever more effective weapons, is not so much a metaphor for a game as it is the most immediate and serious existential threat to humanity, even moreso than the cl... (read more)

Agents which do not care even instrumentally about effecting the wider world probably will not predominate. They will probably be bystanders and NPCs - and by their own lights, this is fine.

I would point your attention to Rucker's character Sta-Hi Mooney, from the Ware series. An inattentive reader of Software might consider this character a bland hedonist, and in the first sense he is. But through the novel it is revealed that he is very engaged in a Dionysian manner, the disruption of rationality provided by drugs gives him an awareness that is not avail... (read more)

This is not some "Noble Savage" view, as the Greeks were indeed an example of relative high civilization compared to their contemporaries, and I have applied none of the typical virtues that are associated with such a narrative. The Noble Savage trope is largely praising the imagined warlike and masculine qualities of populations that are seen as less civilized. The Noble Savage is innocent only of the effeminate quality of civilization.

This talk about efficiency might lead somewhere fruitful, even if your argument is confused and pointless: We just have s... (read more)

So, I see you've been looking into Wikipedia and beginning some interest in history. I'm glad you've taken some of your first steps into a deeper understanding of the topic. There are a few warnings, though. When we see numbers in ancient texts such as Plutarch's reference to "thirty thousand," these need to be framed with extreme caution and understanding that ancients simply did not keep accurate records, such as birth certificates, and what evidence we do have shows the numbers to be always exaggerated. We must consider also that Thucydides' history is ... (read more)

Those hardly count as cherrypicked examples when they're so incredibly vague. You did not name a single historian, Greek city state, solitary event, or personality from history which could be counted as an example supporting any thesis. These are only vague mischaracterizations and not data points. I have explained to you in great detail how Whiggish history was and is a politically-interested style of writing history that has gone out of fashion for nearly all experts in the field. There are plenty of tribal controversies in the interpretation of history, but this isn't really one that historians currently care too much about at all.

The argument here is incredibly unconvincing and utterly puzzling. Moses is a mythological figure

These vast sweeping claims you're making are not original thoughts that you've gotten from firsthand sources, but rather they are from 18th and 19th century historians. That is, the narrative of gradual improvement over time in what's called Whiggish history. It's very popular among non-historians or amateur historians but 20th century historians were very critical of this view. Experts in the field, the people who are making a career of "looking at historical documents," have largely flipped on this view.

Herbert Butterfield wrote a famous takedown, The Wh... (read more)

Platonism is the first sin of Rationalist discourse. The idea that logic has a direct connection with reality only makes a computer programmer into an instant master of all disciplines. If we accept the more conventional philosophy of Formalism where logic has a much more vague and obscure correspondence to reality, the study of logic becomes just any other field.

The argument that "people have always been shitty" is ignorant equivocating that tells me you think there is nothing to gain from the topic, because if people do not change then History is a worthless project. What very little we know about ancient witch hunting in Rome is utterly irrelevant to the easily illustrated current trend of increasing shittiness.

You are making a mistake of extreme naivete by presuming that people of the past reasoned in the way that we do. In fact, the mass slaughter of civilians as a strategy to win a war is a defining feature for modern warfare, in stark contrast with a relatively far more innocent past. Battles were most often not fought at all, and sieges often resolved without bloodshed. The farther we go back the more ritualistic warfare tends to be. In the anthropological setting warfare is much more about display and the definition of boundaries, and obviously the very concept of survival of the fittest is one that does not even come into play until the 18th and 19th centuries

The only problem with this "gotcha" is that most people don't really appreciate just how recent of a phenomenon witch crazes are. It is by and large constrained to the early modern period falling between the 16th and 18th century. However, the tendency of early modern people for scapegoating and blame does not end there and we see a fair continuity into the recent era, with most mentions of cat burning happening in the 19th century. The early industrial era is where we see a heyday of pogroms against Jewish populations in Europe, and by the time we are see... (read more)

Serfs were not property of any master and ideally had protection against displacement and violence. In practice this didn't always play out, but neither do liberal human rights. Equivocating serfdom to the displacement of millions of Africans as property is convenient and lazy, and completely illogical. And there is no denying the modernity in the African slave trade, the massive scale, the involvement of mechanization of the cotton gin, and on and on.

Probably just about every historian you can find is going to refer to the 1500s as the early modern or lat... (read more)

We want to believe that as moderns we are better, more rational, so much more wise than people of the past, and it is this very conceited and highly sympathetic view of ourselves that is just so unthinkably blind. We may associate religion with the past in some vague way, an irrational set of beliefs that have been superseded by science. And perhaps that is true, but one can only look at the medieval and ancient world with a sense of their great innocence in all matters. Their values of humility, honor, faith, and so on are so different from our own impera... (read more)

When you say, "Christian Rome kept slaves," that's indeed underlining the point that the Christianization of Europe led to a long process of abolitionism taking place over hundreds of years. This trend would only reverse with the introduction of secular reasoning to dehumanize far-flung peoples of colonial territories. This slavery took a uniquely brutal form as the rationality and reason behind the dehumanization of others was, at the time, something more like expert consensus, and it would be religious concerns which, yet again, propelled abolitionism in... (read more)

It's very good for this discussion that we compare modern era chattel slavery with the feudal arrangement of serfdom, and I am glad you brought this up. In the premodern Christian medieval context, slavery was all but completely forbidden, with most of slave trade in Europe taking place between the pagan fringe and the Islamic world in places like Dublin, which were set up to traffic peoples captured in these raids. This is in stark contrast to the systematic chattel slavery of colonial powers of the modern era, which purchased and utilized slaves in entre... (read more)

Unfortunately Golumbia passed away recently and is sorely missed. He explicitly states in the story that a game "without play" was not intended as a "sick burn" of any kind, and that he himself enjoyed these games. As a sometimes Minecraft player, I can for sure see there are indeed many elements of work within the game, as well as some necessity to create order and preserve oneself by securing shelter and resources. The joke "the children yearn for the mines" is a direct reference to this same observation, and Golumbia's paper only shows this dynamic migh... (read more)

I'm glad you understand. More properly, it is an argument for the Formalist philosophy of mathematics. The implications in terms of one's personal religious choices are going to vary, of course, but Fideism is not a full equivalent to Agnosticism. Agnosticism says that we cannot have knowledge while Fideism says that knowledge is still possible through faith.

Medieval logicians, theologians really, typically had a very strong Platonic principle whereby they could often prove the existence of God and derive His properties through reason alone. It was quite complex and tedious, and Occam's razor left us with Fideism, the idea that any gap between reason and reality is in the final analysis filled only by faith. Overly complex self-justifying and self-reassuring linkages that attempt to schematize the relation between map and territory are practically useless and yet take up much of the intellectual life. History ... (read more)

We can happily and easily disprove the idea that Judeo-Christian cosmology "damages society" by comparing the modern secular society developing after 1500AD with that of the Christian society before it.

Poverty was a virtue, and neglecting the needs of others was sinful. The ancient unspoken law of hospitality remained, and turning away a beggar or a traveler who arrived at your door was an extreme taboo that has only very recently flipped. In the modern world, accepting an impoverished stranger into your house is widely considered a dangerous or harmful be... (read more)

The experience of eternity is not analogous at all to a conscious visualization exercise of any kind, as popular as the idea might be. Rather, it is far more relatable in the example of cathedrals and artworks.

I also recommend faith, but not because it has any kind of hyperstitious benefit for manifesting strength or so on, but rather because of the theological argument of Occam's Fideism ringing true with my own personal mystical experience. The presumption that God, the very universe itself, should be coherent or rational and thus fit well to human conce... (read more)

That's all well and good, but there's cost-benefit calculations which are the far more salient consideration. If intelligence is indeed a lever by which a reduction is made, as constrained by these hEC factors, certainly image and video generation would be a very poorly-leveraged position in a class with mass persuasion or archeology. Diminishing returns are not a hard ceiling, as you might have intended, but rather a challenge that businesses have attacked with staggering investments. There is an even worse problem lurking ahead, and I think it challenges... (read more)

The idea that the skill of mass persuasion is capped off at the level of a Napoleon, Hitler, or Cortés is not terribly reassuring. Recognizing and capitalizing on opportunity is a skill also, hallmarked by unconventional and creative thinking. Thus, opportunity cannot be a limitation or ceiling for persuasive power, as suggested, but is rather its unlimited substance. Persuasion is not only a matter of the clever usage and creation of opportunity, but it is also heavily interlinked with coercion and deception. Adversarial groups who are not aware of a dece... (read more)

The historic perspective of ME/CFS is one, as usual, which gave me a greatly increased understanding for what the term is meaning. It was developed to refer to patients in the 80s who flooded doctors with reports of chronic infection of Epstein-Barr, commonly known as Mono. There was a glut of media reports on the phenomenon of chronic EBV, much like we see with long COVID currently. The landmark study coining the term CFS showed that they just were not showing any difference to healthy people who had previously suffered Mono, ruling it out as a cause, and... (read more)

Said more plainly, it is utterly naive to believe Anthropic is motivated by a desire for play in the same way as a child playing with the flow of water. However, when couched within a well-crafted metaphor, sprung on us only after the fact, the careless reader may not even consider the argument's basic premise but accept it on the basis of literary pleasures alone.

I don't mean to pick on you personally, OP, far from it. This particular genre of intuition pumping essay is the bread-and-butter for Rationalist discourse. It's as if the writer cooks a meal and... (read more)

The record is the journalist's and not the interview subject's. When the journalist says something will be off the record, they have some authority on the matter, as they are the ones who will be writing said record. The meaning in this sense is a mere reassurance and nothing more.

When an interview subject requests for statements to be off the record, or worse, declares that they are off the record before saying them, they are of course requesting or merely performing a reassurance. Add to this picture a subject also requesting editorial powers, and it is ... (read more)

This calls to mind Borges, On Exactitude in Science. When everything has been reduced, ie the completion of the Great Reduction, there ceases to be any use in it. It is unwieldy as what it describes. And in the final analysis, it is yet a faddish creation of temporal power.

To follow the footsteps of Husserl, we can perform a much more fundamental reduction, possible by collapsing nouma and noesis. We do not have a "map," there is no "territory" at all. Rather, we build logic upon something more indisputable, Being, and already our reason is no longer cripp... (read more)

Should we extend the scope of the data to include pre-Carolingian texts, it would of course approach infinite sentence length as punctuation had rarely been implemented. Even worse, should we go back into ancient Roman or Greek texts, a naive appraisal might also lead us to believe that syllables per word also approach staggering levels of complexity, since the convention of placing spaces or interpuncts between words was uncommon.

Indeed, spacing between words, capitalization, and punctuation were expressly introduced for readability incidentally, a conseq... (read more)

This is amusing. When you ask to speak "off the record," it does not mean anything legally or otherwise. It is entirely up to their discretion what is and isn't shared, as they are the ones writing the story.

Occam's razor is well known, but few seem to understand its origin from within the anti-rationalist backdrop of his theology. Duns Scotus makes a coherent proof for God, but it is also a trivial and ridiculous exercise. Occam's brilliant contribution to theology was this more clever idea of a God not bound by human conventions or conceptions. His "razor" has indeed become somewhat of a convention itself, and it is entirely unwise to proceed on the presumption that Nature should be elegant, coherent, or consistent with rational discourse, which is at the en... (read more)

Greetings, LessWrong. I am a science fiction author, programmer, and antihumanist. I'm here because I want to engage in what I believe is the great debate of our time. I am against humanism in the classic sense, where we're talking in terms of Petrarch's optimism about human ingenuity and capabilities. However, I share in his historic perspective that the world must be reborn from a dark age.

Computationally evolved models are largely an irrational mess which do not produce elegant equations or traceable logical chains, and cannot be fully reduced to the sc... (read more)