OrphanWilde

Replying toPeople who lie about how much they eat are jerks

People who lie about how much they eat are jerks

No it doesn't. You use up more calories when you weigh more. If you eat an apple a day you will reach an equilibrium where you have just enough extra weight to burn a number of calories per day equivalent to an apple. 95 calories in an apple will still get you to about 9.5 kilograms extra, which is a lot, but not near 50 pounds and it won't increase without limit.)

The information I have seen suggests a pound of fat requires 2-3 kilocalories per day to maintain itself, which implies a range of 30-47.5 pounds from a 95 kilocalorie deviation, which would be 13-20 kilograms.

I have no idea how accurate that... (read more)

Replying toPeople who lie about how much they eat are jerks

OrphanWilde10y

People who lie about how much they eat are jerks

It's not just "harder", it requires skills and knowledge, which most people don't actually have.

The point is that "exercise" isn't helpful advice to lose weight. First, it's not terribly effective at it over short durations, and people need to know that what they're doing is working. Second, if somebody isn't already exercising, they're going to hurt themselves, have a six week recovery time, try again, hurt themselves, and give up on losing weight. Third, you're communicating something different than what you think you are; "Go for a walk every day" is good advice, by comparison to "exercise". The temptation is to object that that is exactly exercising -... (read more)

Replying toPeople who lie about how much they eat are jerks

OrphanWilde10y

People who lie about how much they eat are jerks

I don't recommend having this argument. It's useless in almost every respect.

There are two fundamental issues. First, most people don't understand what a Calorie looks like, and think the difference between a healthy weight and an unhealthy weight is a large amount of food, rather than a small amount of food compounded over long periods of time. Want to lose weight in a sustained and sustainable fashion? Subtract a small amount of food over a long period of time. Instead, people crash-diet, then go back to normal eating habits.

An extra apple a day translates, over years, to up to 50 extra pounds. Looking at two people's... (read more)

Replying toMarket Failure: Sugar-free Tums

OrphanWilde10y

Market Failure: Sugar-free Tums

You think that an argument that ultimately boils down to "Look how capitalism is a failure at providing basic things" isn't going to provoke defensive reactions?

This doesn't even pretend very hard.

-2

Replying toMarket Failure: Sugar-free Tums

OrphanWilde10y

Market Failure: Sugar-free Tums

Downvoted: If we're going to have a ban on politics, let's have a ban on politics.

-6

Replying toMeme: Valuable Vulnerability

OrphanWilde10y

Meme: Valuable Vulnerability

That does not mean never ever having a single negative emotion, just as I presume that he was not speaking of never having any emotions of any kind.

I was, indeed, speaking of not having any emotions of any kind. Or rather, not qualitatively experiencing them; I'd get angry, for example, but I'd notice I was angry because my hands would start clenching of their own accord, not because I'd experience anything resembling an "anger" qualia, or have my thoughts actually influenced by my emotions. To such an extent that, because I didn't experience either lust or love or any of the variations on those two themes as an internal emotive force, I assumed for many years I was asexual.

Replying toOpen thread, June 20 - June 26, 2016

OrphanWilde10y

Open thread, June 20 - June 26, 2016

Absolutely agreed. But it's about conflicts among preferred outcomes of a decision, not about preferences among disconnected world-states.

Less about two outcomes your preferences conflict on, and more about, say, your preferences and mine.

Insofar as your internal preferences conflict, I'm not certain ethics are the correct approach to resolve the issue.

If they're unaware because there's no reasonable way for them to be aware, it's hard for me to hold them to blame for not acting on that. Ought implies can. If they're unaware because they've made choices to avoid the truth, then they're ethically inferior to the version of themselves which do learn and act.

This leads to a curious metaethics problem; I can... (read more)

Replying toOpen thread, June 20 - June 26, 2016

OrphanWilde10y

Open thread, June 20 - June 26, 2016

Ethics is solely and simply about decisions - which future state, conditional on current choice, is preferable.

From my perspective, we have a word for that, and it isn't ethics. It's preference. Ethics are the rules governing how preference conflicts are mediated.

I'm not trying to compare a current world with poverty against a counterfactual current world without - that's completely irrelevant and unhelpful.

Then imagine somebody living an upper-class life who is unaware of suffering. Are they ethically inferior because they haven't made decisions to alleviate pain they don't know about? Does informing them of the pain change their ethical status - does it make them ethically worse-off?

Replying toMeme: Valuable Vulnerability

OrphanWilde10y

Meme: Valuable Vulnerability

Well, I followed a policy of strict emotional regulation, and it made me anhedonic for more than a decade. I'm actively working on feeling things, whereas previously, I would have described my emotional state almost entirely in terms of equanimity, although, since I didn't know the word, I used an artful description of same. (In an emotional state, I would describe myself as balancing on top of a very narrow tower, where emotions were winds attempting to knock me down.)

Which is to say - in my experience, you don't get to pick and choose which emotions you experience. If you start refusing some, you'll discover they all fade away. This is initially extremely attractive, if you're experiencing intense negative emotions, but in the long-term, I believe the term for the mental state this produces is "clinical depression".

It's better to learn to cope with your emotions than to attempt to refuse them.

Replying toOpen thread, June 20 - June 26, 2016

OrphanWilde10y

Open thread, June 20 - June 26, 2016

There are two problems.

In the first scenario, in which ethics is an obligation (i/e, your ethical standing decreases for not fulfilling ethical obligations), you're ethically a worse person in a world with poverty, because there are ethical obligations you cannot meet. The idea of ethical standing being independent of your personal activities is, to me, contrary to the nature of ethics.

In the second scenario, in which ethics are additive (you're not a worse person for not doing good, but instead, the good you do adds to some sort of ethical "score"), your ethical standing is limited by how horrible the world you are in is - that is, the most ethical... (read more)

Suppose HBD is True

OrphanWilde

10y

Suppose, for the purposes of argument, HBD (Human bio-diversity, the claim that distinct populations (I will be avoiding using the word "race" here insomuch as possible) of humans exist and have substantial genetical variance which accounts for some difference in average intelligence from population to population) is true, and that all its proponents are correct in accusing the politicization of science for burying this information.

I seek to ask the more interesting question: Would it matter?

1. Societal Ramifications of HBD: Eugenics

So, we now have some kind of nice, tidy explanation for different characters among different groups of people. Okay. We have a theory. It has explanatory power. What can we do with it?

Unless... (read 1090 more words →)

153

-17

Making My Peace with Belief

OrphanWilde

10y

I grew up in an atheistic household.

Almost needless to say, I was relatively hostile towards religion for most of my early life. A few things changed that.

First, the apology of a pastor. A friend of mine was proselytizing at me, and apparently discussed it with his pastor; the pastor apologized to my parents, and explained to my friend he shouldn't be trying to convert people. My friend apologized to me after considering the matter. We stayed friends for a little while afterwards, although I left that school, and we lost contact.

I think that was around the time that I realized that religion is, in addition to being a belief system, a way... (read 515 more words →)

Dark Arts: Defense in Reputational Warfare

OrphanWilde

10y

First, the Dark Arts are, as the name implies, an art, not a science. Likewise, defending against them is. An artful attacker can utilize expected defenses against you; if you can be anticipated, you can be defeated. The rules, therefore, are guidelines. I'm going to stage the rules in a narrative form; they don't need to be, however, because life doesn't follow a narrative. The narrative exists to give them context, to give the reader a sense of the purpose of each rule.

Rule #0: Never follow the rules if they would result in a worse outcome.

Now, generally, the best defense is to never get attacked in the first place. Security through... (read 1000 more words →)

Omega's Idiot Brother, Epsilon

OrphanWilde

10y

Epsilon walks up to you with two boxes, A and b, labeled in rather childish-looking handwriting written in crayon.

"In box A," he intones, sounding like he's trying to be foreboding, which might work better when he hits puberty, "I may or may not have placed a million of your human dollars." He pauses for a moment, then nods. "Yes. I may or may not have placed a million dollars in this box. If I expect you to open Box B, the million dollars won't be there. Box B will contain, regardless of what you do, one thousand dollars. You may choose to take one box, or both; I will leave with any... (read 166 more words →)

The Winding Path

OrphanWilde

10y

The First Step

The first step on the path to truth is superstition. We all start there, and should acknowledge that we start there.

Superstition is, contrary to our immediate feelings about the word, the first stage of understanding. Superstition is the attribution of unrelated events to a common (generally unknown or unspecified) cause - it could be called pattern recognition. The "supernatural" component generally included in the definition is superfluous, because supernatural merely refers to that which isn't part of nature - which means reality -, which is an elaborate way of saying something whose relationship to nature is not yet understood, or else nonexistent. If we discovered that ghosts are real, and... (read 594 more words →)

In Defense of the Fundamental Attribution Error

OrphanWilde

11y

The Fundamental Attribution Error

Also known, more accurately, as "Correspondence Bias."

http://lesswrong.com/lw/hz/correspondence_bias/

The "more accurately" part is pretty important; bias -may- result in error, but need not -necessarily- do so, and in some cases may result in reduced error.

A Simple Example

Suppose I write a stupid article that makes no sense and rambles on without any coherent point. There might be a situational cause of this; maybe I'm tired. Correcting for correspondence bias means that more weight should be given to the situational explanation than the dispositional explanation, that I'm the sort of person who writes stupid articles that ramble on. The question becomes, however, whether or not this increases the accuracy of your assessment of me;... (read 711 more words →)

Visions and Mirages: The Sunk Cost Dilemma

OrphanWilde

11y

Summary

How should a rational agent handle the Sunk Cost Dilemma?

Introduction

You have a goal, and set out to achieve it. Step by step, iteration by iteration, you make steady progress towards completion - but never actually get any closer. You're deliberately not engaging in the sunk cost fallacy - at no point does the perceived cost of completion get higher. But at each step, you discover another step you didn't originally anticipate, and had no priors for anticipating.

You're rational. You know you shouldn't count sunk costs in the total cost of the project. But you're now into twice as much effort as you would have originally invested, and have done everything you originally... (read 716 more words →)

-13

Subsuming Purpose, Part II: Solving the Solution

OrphanWilde

11y

Summary: It's easy to get caught up in solving the wrong problems, solving the problems with a particular solution instead of solving the actual problem. You should pay very careful attention to what you are doing and why.

I'll relate a seemingly purposeless story about a video game to illustrate:

I was playing Romance of the Three Kingdoms some years ago, and was trying to build the perfect city. (The one city I ruled, actually.) Enemies kept attacking, and the need to recruit troops was slowing my population growth (not to mention deliberate sabotage by my enemies), so eventually I came to the conclusion that I would have to conquer the map in order... (read 670 more words →)

Does the Utility Function Halt?

OrphanWilde

11y

Suppose, for a moment, that somebody has written the Utility Function. It takes, as its input, some Universe State, runs it through a Morality Modeling Language, and outputs a number indicating the desirability of that state relative to some baseline, and more importantly, other Universe States which we might care to compare it to.

Can I feed the Utility Function the state of my computer right now, as it is executing a program I have written? And is a universe in which my program halts superior to one in which my program wastes energy executing an endless loop?

If you're inclined to argue that's not what the Utility Function is supposed to be evaluating, I have to ask what, exactly, it -is- supposed to be evaluating? We can reframe the question in terms of the series of keys I press as I write the program, if that is an easier problem to solve than what my computer is going to do.

Emotional Basilisks

OrphanWilde

13y

Suppose it is absolutely true that atheism has a negative impact on your happiness and lifespan. Suppose furthermore that you are the first person in your society of relatively happy theists who happened upon the idea of atheism, and moreover found absolute proof of its correctness, and quietly studied its effects on a small group of people kept isolated from the general population, and you discover that it has negative effects on happiness and lifespan. Suppose that it -does- free people from a considerable amount of time wasted - from your perspective as a newfound atheist - in theistic theater.

Would you spread the idea?

This is, in our theoretical society, the emotional equivalent... (read more)

-8

LESSWRONG
LW

LESSWRONG
LW

In Defense of Tone Arguments

Making My Peace with Belief

Is Politics the Mindkiller? An Inconclusive Test

In Defense of the Fundamental Attribution Error

OrphanWilde

OrphanWilde

Suppose HBD is True

Making My Peace with Belief

Dark Arts: Defense in Reputational Warfare

Omega's Idiot Brother, Epsilon

The Winding Path

In Defense of the Fundamental Attribution Error

Visions and Mirages: The Sunk Cost Dilemma

OrphanWilde

In Defense of Tone Arguments

Making My Peace with Belief

Is Politics the Mindkiller? An Inconclusive Test

In Defense of the Fundamental Attribution Error

OrphanWilde

OrphanWilde

Suppose HBD is True

Making My Peace with Belief

Dark Arts: Defense in Reputational Warfare

Omega's Idiot Brother, Epsilon

The Winding Path

In Defense of the Fundamental Attribution Error

Visions and Mirages: The Sunk Cost Dilemma

1. Societal Ramifications of HBD: Eugenics

The First Step

The Fundamental Attribution Error

A Simple Example

Summary

Introduction