All of occlude's Comments + Replies

I've thought of this advice to keep identity small as installing a new executive-level program, "Monitor group affiliations with potentially mind-killing emotional attachments". Since I've done that, it seems like all my attachments have become a lot more gooey.

One of the transfiguration safety rules: Never transfigure something into anything that might be eaten or breathed. Is it possible to demonstrate partial transfiguration (on, for example, his father's rock) while transforming much of its substance very temporarily into a breathable gas?

I've found The Art of Charm Podcast valuable in helping me overcome mild social anxiety and in being more confident generally. The podcast has its roots in the pickup community (which is particularly evident in its early episodes), but has morphed into more of a "men's lifestyle" show.

Do you have written something that explain that evidence in more detail?

Clicked around out of curiosity and found what appears to be a cursory explanation for Aron's belief in Jesus' resurrection here. First impression is that he has treated NT accounts of Jesus as though they were written by several separate eyewitnesses (in other words, as they're represented in the Bible and by modern Christian churches) and may not be aware of alternative explanations of the origins of the gospels by historians. Lukeprog's journey might be illuminating.

Robin ultimately calculates that he is probably not a sim in this post. Much like the variables in the Drake equation, Robin's probability estimates are built on a number of unknowns, so we really can't do the calculation. But I have to admit that my own logic failed to take any of these variables into consideration, so please ignore that part of the grandfather.

Seconded.

.Please look around you. Does it look like we have got dumber in the last 20,000 years? I'd say this is tons of data. It may be hard to estimate in Bayesian terms, but certainly not less than +100 db of evidence against the alternative.

What I see when I look around is largely the product of millenia of cumulative invention and discovery.

If all you know about two mammals is that they have different brain sizes, then it seems plausible to guess that the one with the larger brain (especially if the brain is larger by mass and as a ratio to body size) has greater overall functionality. This doesn't seem like a particularly privileged hypothesis, just the baseline observation.

This thing you call a "map", conscious experience, is part of the "territory" - part of reality - which itself is supposed to be coextensive with physics.

This is interesting, true, and really complicates any quest to maintain an accurate map.

Upvoted (the OP too). I think some of your interlocutors may be thinking past you here, in the sense that they have dismissed your central point as a triviality. But there are fundamental differences between interactions of particles in the open universe, the state changes that particle interacti... (read more)

I only see three options. Deny that anything is actually green; become a dualist; or (supervillain voice) join me, and together, we can make a new ontology.

Sure I'll join you; what color is the supervillain sidekick's uniform?

Upvoted for being a completely reasonable comment given that you haven't read through the entirety of a thread that's gotten totally monstrous.

Ah, apologies if I've completely missed the point (which is entirely possible).

I get exactly the same result.

For the same reason that if I had a see-an-image-of-Grandpa button, and pushed it, I wouldn't count the fact that I saw him as evidence that he's somehow still alive, but if I saw him right now spontaneously, I would.

Imagine that you have a switch in your home which responds to your touch by turning on a lamp (this probably won't take much imagination). One day this lamp, which was off, suddenly and for no apparent reason turns on. Would you assign supernatural or mundane causes to this event?

Now this isn't absolute proof that the switch wasn't turned o... (read more)

I'm not an expert, but with this in mind it should be a rather simple matter to apply a few strategies so that LW shows up near the top of relevant search results. At the very least we could create wiki pages with titles like "How to Think Better" and "How to Figure Out What's True" with links to relevant articles or sequences. The fact that rationality has little obvious commercial value should work in our favor by keeping competing content rather sparse.

"Ish," yes. I have to admit I've had a hard time navigating this enormous thread, and haven't read all of it, including the evidence of demonic influence you're referring to. However, I predict in advance that 1) this evidence is based on words that a man wrote in an ancient book, and that 2) I will find this evidence dubious.

Two equally unlikely propositions should require equally strong evidence to be believed. Neither dragons nor demons exist, yet you assert that demons are real. Where, then, is the chain of entangled events leading from the s... (read more)

What is true is already so, Owning up to it doesn't make it worse. Not being open about it doesn't make it go away.

You're doing it wrong. The power of the Litany comes from evidence. Every time you applying the Litany of Gendlin to an unsubstantiated assertion, a fairie drops dead.

Is that a worldwide prediction?

I won't argue that newborns are people, because I have the same problem defining person that you seem to have. But until I can come up with a cogent reduction distilling person to some quality or combination of qualities that actually exist -- some state of a region of the universe -- then it seems prudent to err on the side of caution.

Please let me know if I've missed a discussion of this point; it seems important, but I haven't seen it answered.

What is the particular and demonstrable quality of personhood that defines this okay to kill/not okay to kill threshold? In short, what is blicket?

Infanticide of one's own children should be legal (if done for some reason other than sadism) for up to ten months after birth. Reason: extremely young babies aren't yet people.

I would recommend against expressing this opinion in your OKCupid profile.

Using Noom Weight Loss Coach for integrated food logging, workout tracking, and weight loss plan management. I'm more aware of the quality of the food I'm eating and of how calorie content and exercise are contributing to my weight loss goals. Highly recommended.

Thanks, I'm always looking for sneaky ways to reduce inferential distances with my Facebook friends. My subversive anti-faith sermon posted with this article was:

On Christmas day, 1861, Lincoln's ability to be skeptical of his own intuitions helped him avert war with Britain.

It is easy to assert, without evidence, what we believe, hope, or wish to be true. It is more difficult, as our human biases compel us to dismiss dissenting voices, to properly doubt, to give reality a fair hearing, and to come to a conclusion at odds with who we were the day before.

EDIT: Typo correction; Lincoln ≠ 1961.

I find I have very little access to my own motivation algorithms, so that things I think I want to do and things I actually end up doing do not always align very well. External deadlines (as opposed to self-imposed ones) are some of the only things that consistently motivate me, but they don't work very well for personal goals.

but somehow miss the intended target site.

...and miss rather badly, at that.

The Aliens solution seems a bit harsh, though probably effective. I estimate P(wart comes back|wart nuked from orbit) < .1

Radical phalangectomy; it's the only way to be sure.

I was thinking that the downvotes were a reaction to the last sentence, though like prase I had a hard time figuring out what you were asking for. I'm reading "capable of forming empirical conjectures for mathematics" as capable of using evidence to make reasonable guesses about the answers to math problems and "discover the principle of mathematical proof" as figure out that mathematics principles can be proven. Is this close to your intended meaning?

My experience with similar groups bears this out, although I think I'd loosely construe "obviously useful" as things that make us better/stronger and things that are fun to do.

English isn't C++, a form is pretty much defined as acceptable by usage.

This is certainly true; primary considerations should be comprehensibility and consistency. They in this context is perfectly understandable, if not yet considered strictly "correct."

Frankly, I've forgotten what my intention was in pointing it out in the first place.

I might be interested as well.

Not at the moment of reading, possibly because I had no standard of comparison. In retrospect, the line "Beyond the reach of God" doesn't reinforce the vision of transcendent humanity quite as powerfully as the original. I think it was the unexpected contrast of moving from the discussion of evolutionary psychology to this futuristic vision of humanity that gave the ending its power.

I read this version, then the comments, then Eliezer's version. I had a similar reaction to both.

Surprise, frisson, and tears; I'd never read the original.

I agree with your argument in the sense that you meant it, though I interpreted the question differently.

That particular turn of phrase (configuration of quarks) was borrowed from Eliezer's description of reductionism in Luke's "Pale Blue Dot" podcast #88. It left an impression.

Morality is a very real part of the universe as it can be observed in the functioning of the human brain.

I try, of late, not to create sections of map that don't correspond to any territory. What if we taboo the word morality? Is there brain function that corresponds to morality and that is distinct from preferences, beliefs, emotions, and goals? It seems that positing the existence of something called morality creates something additional and unnecessary.

I had fun doing the background research to be able to give a number to the P(Aliens) questions.

I enjoyed this too. Tried to calibrate Aliens 1 with Aliens 2, and found that what seemed like a modest estimate for Aliens 2 (still a shot in the dark due to too many Drake unknowns, but what the hell) created an enormous probability estimate for Aliens 1. More convinced than ever that we are not alone.

Survey complete. Had to answer "there's no such thing as morality" because I can't imagine a configuration of quarks that would make any of the other choices true. What would it even mean at a low level for one normative theory to be "correct?"

Small edit needed:

"In the real world, sometimes you have more than one animal per farm."

I expect that more than one of my brain modules are trying to judge between incompatible conclusions, and selectively giving attention to the inputs of the problem.

My thinking was similar to yours -- it feels less like I'm applying scope insensitivity and more like I'm rounding the disutility of specks down due to their ubiquity, or their severity relative to torture, or the fact that the effects are so dispersed. If one situation goes unnoticed, lost in the background noise, while another irreparably damages someone's mind, then that should have some impa... (read more)

If Omega tells you that he will give either 1¢ each to 3^^^3 random people or $100,000,000,000.00 to the SIAI, and that you get to choose which course of action he should take, what would you do? That's a giant amount of distributed utility vs a (relatively) modest amount of concentrated utility.

I suspect that part of the exercise is not to outsmart yourself.

Hello everyone, it's so great to be here. I was introduced to LessWrong by a post left by C. Russo on Freedomainradio.com back in late July, which dumped me right into How to Actually Change Your Mind. Since then, I have found myself spending progressively more of my free time here, reading both old and new content.

Over the last several years, I've made a habit of spending my evenings online, blown by the winds of curiosity. While this has led me to the vague sense that I needed to make some adjustments to my map, I didn't have a good sense of the tools I ... (read more)

Whether it should or shouldn't, I don't believe it does.

A great point, concisely made. I meant this as a bit of a joke, but I see that I should have chosen my words more skillfully anyway. Upvoted.

I hereby invoke Crocker's Rules. Go nuts.

Shouldn't the act of posting on LW automatically imply an acceptance of Crocker's Rules?

Anyhow, to the list!

Most interesting-sounding: Xander's lament, Concrete language, and Mind map of ugh field (very dangerous; you go first). I wouldn't skip over the other posts, either.

Have you experimented with sleep posture? A cursory search turned up a 2000 study showing that sleeping in a supine position might contribute to lucid dreams. Some of the subjects suffered from hypnopompic sleep paralysis:

Dahmen N; Kasten M. REM-associated hallucinations and sleep paralysis are dependent on body posture. Journal Of Neurology, 2001 May; Vol. 248 (5), pp. 423-4

There are plenty of other constraints.

Many of these factors seem, with high probability, like genuine constraints (e.g. a second generation star). But I wonder whether others might be examples of anthropic generalizing from one example (e.g. availability of a specific ratio of elements). Presumably alien life would adapt to whatever conditions actually exist in their world.