We don't just use 'winning' because, well.. 'winning' can easily work out to 'losing' in real world terms. (think of a person who alienates everyone they meet through their extreme competitiveness. They are focused on winning, to the point that they sacrifice good relations with people. But this is both a) not what is meant by 'rationalists win' and b) a highly accessible definition of winning - naive "Competition X exists. Agent A wins, Agent B loses"). VASTLY more accessible than 'achieving what actually improves your life, as opposed to what y...
I just want to clarify here -- are you aware that personal wikis and server software such as MediaWiki are different classes of software? The most relevant reason to use personal wiki software rather than wiki serving software is, no server == no consequent security holes and system load, no need to do sysadmin type stuff to get it going. Personal wiki software is generally just an ordinary program, meaning it has it's own GUI and can have features that it would be insecure to expose over the internet.
Personally I have found Zim a little lacking when I wan...
Is there some reason you use MediaWiki rather than a personal wiki software (for example Zim)?
Simple part first: yes, I claim that every city has or will soon have near-ubiquitous internet access. If you need to deny your future self the ability to choose to use the internet easily, you won't be able to live in a city.
One doesn't follow from the other.
Take out any built-in wifi hardware; get a usb wireless module. These are tiny enough that you can employ almost any security/inconvenience measure on them. Decide which security/inconvenience measures are appropriate. Done.
Evidence that would substantially inform a simulation of the enforcement of those beliefs. For example, history provides pretty clear evidence of the ultimate result of fascist states/dictatorships, partisan behaviour, and homogeneous group membership The qualities found in this projected result is highly likely to conflict with other preferences and beliefs.
At that point, the person may still say 'Shut up, I believe what I want to believe.' But that would only mean they are rejecting the evidence, not that the evidence doesn't apply.
I'd be a lot more inclined to respond to this if I didn't need to calculate probability values (ie. could input weights instead, which were then normalized.)
To that end, here is a simple Python script which normalizes a list of weights (given as commandline arguments) into a list of probabilities:
#!/usr/bin/python
import sys
weights = [float(v) for v in sys.argv[1:]]
total_w = sum(weights)
probs = [v / total_w for v in weights]
print ('Probabilities : %s' % (", ".join([str(v) for v in probs])))
Produces output like this:
Probabilities : 0.1, 0.2, 0.3, 0.4
Yes, that's roughly the reformulation I settled on. Except that I omitted 'have the habit' because it's magical-ish - desiring to have the habit of X is not that relevant to actually achieving the habit of X, rather simply desiring to X strongly enough to actually X is what results in the building of a habit of X.
But in point of fact, the way it works out is that Christianity tends to make people more generous, caring and trustworthy than atheism does. So it goes.
But this is not in point of fact. Citation very much needed.
I don't disagree that (strong, ie. 'God does NOT exist' rather than 'there is no evidence that God exists') atheism attracts some jerks, btw. Any belief that is essentially anti-X has the problem of attracting at least some people who simply enjoy punishing belief in X.
Upvoted, but I would like to point out that it is not immediately obvious that the template can be modified to suit instrumental rationality as well as epistemological rationality; At a casual inspection the litany appears to be about epistemology only.
Perhaps his server is underspecced? It's currently slowed to an absolute c r a w l. What little I have seen certainly looks worthwhile, though.
I like this idea, but am seriously concerned about its effect on eye health. Weak eye muscles are not a thing you want to have, even if you live in the safest place in the world.
I don't see how understanding, acceptance, and love follow from rationality.
They do not follow from it, they are necessary to it.
Are you saying that rationalism is a "philosophy of life", even leaving the soundness aside for a minute?
No. But a...
Belittling their sense of the distinction seems like a pretty unfriendly thing to do.
However, some of the things that religion proscribes are also pretty unfriendly things to do. (arguably religion itself is an unfriendly thing to do). So until they stop doing such things, they can reasonably expect to cop retaliation for their own hostility. (in proportion to their craziness, IME -- for example Buddhism doesn't cop much flak, whereas Christianity does)
Putting yourself in the position of being significantly opposed to reality cannot be rationally viewed...
But this is not a specific problem of rationalists.. It's a broader problem with Western culture. Feeling strongly about things is not 'cool' or impressive. Plenty of people enjoy complaining, but passion makes you an alien.. perhaps an inspiring one, but ultimately an alien.. a person of whom people say 'oh, I could never do that', even if in the other breath they praise your passion and dedication.
I hesitate to assign a definite cause for that, but I am willing to comment that Western society somewhat deifies disaffected sociopathy, through its presentat...
I find I can always count on you to make pointlessly snarky comments.
I would prefer to be more specific, and say 'understanding, acceptance, confidence, control, and love' (with clear definitions for each, probably similar to the ones in the GROW Blue Book). Not all of these things can be used to make clever, snappy remarks to wow outsiders, but they are all necessary for a satisfying life, and therefore must be addressed effectively by any sound philosophy of life. The parent comment was only vague, not wrong.
That would be equivalent to self-sabotage or an attempt to systematically deny that 'you' possess some particular attribute A (eg. homosexuality, atheism..) which you do in fact possess, so.. no.
You are allowed to try to talk me into murdering someone, e.g. by appealing to facts I do not know; or pointing out that I have other preferences at odds with that one, and challenging me to resolve them; or trying to present me with novel moral arguments. You are not allowed to hum a tune in such a way as to predictably cause a buffer overflow that overwrites the encoding of that preference elsewhere in my cortex
.. And?
Don't you realize that this is just like word laddering? Any sufficiently powerful and dedicated agent can convince you to change your ...
Gandhi does not prefer to murder. He prefers to not-murder. His human brain contains the wiring to implement "frothing lunacy", sure, and a little pill might bring it out, but a pill is not a fact. It's not even an argument.
No pills required. People are not 100% conditionable, but they are highly situational in their behaviour. I'll stand by the idea that, for example, anyone who has ever fantasized about killing anyone can be situationally manipulated over time to consciously enjoy actual murder. Your subconscious doesn't seem to actually k...
people like to Google-stalk everyone they come into contact with,
People do that?
People have too much time on their hands. Geez.
All cool. But there has to actually be such a C there in the first place, such that you can pull the levers on it by making me aware of new facts. You don't just get to add one in.
Totally agree. Adding them in is unnecessary, they are already there. That's my understanding of humanity -- a person has most of the preferences, at some level, that any person ever ever had, and those things will emerge given the right conditions.
...for example, humans have an unhealthy, unrealistic, and excessive desire for certainty.
I'm not sure this is actually true.
You're aware that 'catgirls' is local jargon for "non-conscious facsimiles" and therefore the concern here is orthogonal to porn?
Oops, had forgotten that, thanks. I don't agree that catgirls in that sense are orthogonal to porn, though. At all.
If you don't mind, please elaborate on what part of "healthy relationship" you think can't be cashed out in preference satisfaction
No part, but you can't merely 'satisfy preferences'.. you have to also not-satisfy preferences that have a stagnating effect. Or IOW, a healthy relationship is ...
As a programmer, "Hack" has the connotation of a clever exploit of existing mechanics. It also has the connotation you specify, but I'd argue that the systematically flawed nature of humans requires us to employ such hacks (accepting that they are not ideal, but also that anything we replace them with is also likely to be a hack)
There is an obvious comparison to porn here, even though you disclaim 'not catgirls'.
Anyhow I think the merit of such a thing depends on a) value calculus of optimization, and b) amount of time occupied.
a)
Yes, if I don't take notes on the first reading there won't be a second reading. Not much detail -- more than a page is a problem (this can be ameliorated though, see below). I make an effort to include points of particular agreement, disagreement and some projects to test the ideas (hopefully projects I actually want to do rather than mere 'toy' projects).
Now would be a good time to mention TreeSheets, which I feel solves a lot of the problems of more established note-taking methods (linear, wiki, mindmap). It can be summarized as 'infinitely nestable spr...
Now I have found an easy way to snap out of it: simply switch the book/subject. Switching from math to biology/neuroscience works better than switching from math to math (e.g. algebra to topology, category theory to recursion theory, etc), but the latter can still recover some of the mental resistance built up. I don't see how this can fit in the framework of "have-to" and "want-to".
I do ('have-to' and 'want-to' are dynamically redefined things for a person, not statically defined things). I regard excessive repetition as dangerous*...
Somebody replied with an explanation of how I was basically omitting the relativization of 'you' when considering what values to use.
That is, B should bet according to his confidence that he is correct, which in my case would be 70%..
A: 60% confidence B: 30% confidence
My intent is to demonstrate that, while the above is probably incorrect,
You put in the square of probability you think you're correct minus the square of probability he thinks you are correct all times 25. He uses the same algorithm.
is not an adequate explanation to remember and get the right result out of, because the calculations I specified above are my genuine interpretation of your statements.
(this problem...
Was your intent to point out that these two view points are strictly non-contradictory?. (Your decision algorithm is exactly physics, so no opposition is possible even in principle.)
I like the SEP phrasing better, even though it's only slightly different:
"we are powerless to do anything other than what we actually do"
Feels more sensible because the tenses are not jumbled.
.I see the above point as unequivecal, insofar as I
I see the above sentence as incomplete, and it's not obvious what the ending would be. You might want to fix that.
True, except for the quotes.
"CEV" would be the succinct explanation, but I don't expect anybody to necessarily understand that,so..
If you could create a group of 7 non-extremist people randomly selected from the world population and they'd probably manage to agree that action X, even if not optimal, is a reasonable response to the situation, then X is an ordinary action to take.
(whether it's a good action to take is a separate question. ordinariness is just about not containing any fatal flaws which would be obvious from the outside)
I'm not sure what twist of thinking would allow you to classify murder as ordinary; There's a rather marked difference between common and ordinary. Similarly, assault is not ordinary. One person socially approaching another is ordinary. Emotional discomfort is ordinary. (not sure about emotional pain. But if you get into emotional pain just from being approached, yeah, you've got a problem.)
Though as a point of descriptive curiosity, the level of our emotional responses do actually seem to normalize against what we perceive is common. We need to take measures to counteract that in cases where what is common is not ordinary.
I don't understand why you believe quantum mechanics is non-deterministic. Do you, perhaps, believe probability functions are non-deterministic?
See Motivational internalism/externalism (you might get better quality results if you asked specifically 'is motivational internalism true?' and provided that link; it's basically the same as what you asked but less open to interpretation.)
My personal understanding is that motivational internalism is true in proportion to the level of systematization-preference of the agent. That is, for agents who spend a lot of time building and refining their internal meaning structures, motivational internalism is more true (for THEM, moral judgements tend to inherentl...
I definitely agree that you can't -just- tell a person what you're doing, you need to pick the right person, and cultivate the right attitude (From my observation of myself, it succeeds when I am in the mindset where I can take plenty of teasing equitably, accepting any pokes as potential observations about reality without -stressing- about that.). ..
What rationalization of Rowe's? It's a summary of what they themselves report when 'laddered' (a process which basically consists of asking them what the most terrible thing that could possibly happen to them ...
-- Time less ;)
-- this question feels like it's missing a word or two. What does time-preference mean?
EDIT: Thanks, Arundelo. So basically, time preference ~= level of short-sighted optimization.
In that case, do some projects that strictly require long-sighted optimization. A deadline is one good tool; Telling others what you're doing (in an unequivocal way, so that the greatest disappointment/irritation/harassment is achieved). Of course these tools are nothing new, the point is to increase the pressure as high as you can stand and reduce the amount of ...
I understand that there are situations in which you definitely do not want to show how relatively rational you are.
But there are also situations where bad outcomes are unlikely. At some point you've gotta say "the risk is low enough and the potential gain is great enough that I'll do this thing.", because it's hard to get more rational on your own.
Have you interpreted my comment as a comment on the article rather than passive_fist's comment? Personally I think the OP is competently written and reasonably accurate.
The problem was with passive_fi...
It sounds as if you think either that an instrumentally rational person will not disclose beliefs that have social cost, or that they will change their social situation so that their group doesn't assign social cost to those beliefs. The former is insufficient if you value improving the rationality of people you know; The latter is extremely slow and highly susceptible to external influences.
To me your claim just defines 'instrumentally rational' so narrowly that there would be no instrumentally rational people in existence. I don't find that useful.
There's about .. 24 or 30 shortcuts, yeah (mostly shown in the rightclick menu). In practice I find these match the core actions I do (new task, new subtask, edit task, start/stop time tracking, add notes, mark as completed..).
The new window thing bugs me too (but probably for different reasons, as a designer I think it's the correct choice and they should have just made it faster, probably by using GTK+ instead of Qt)
Sounds (and looks like) a Windows-only version of Task Coach, which is my favored tool.
I'm still unclear on whether tracking time this way does usefully improve my estimates of the amount of time I use on tasks. It does seem to increase my motivation to finish tasks (and then move on and finish another..), though.
I upvoted anandjeyahar for saying what I meant better than I did -- it's the density of concepts rather than the raw length of the text that's an issue.
On reflection, how I approach the 'maintain some failure' criteria is to keep pushing my existing skills into new areas (so I can have a 'win' in terms of pushing my comfort zone even if my particular attempt at this new thing fails. I keep failure close so it doesn't become so scary, as you mention, but I don't utterly and uncategorically fail at any time)
I agree with your responses to the first and second problems. Not the third (there's nothing good about using DSM diagnostic terms as a layperson speaking to laypeople. That stuff is for diagnosticians and needs to stay in its box. Nothing wrong with therapy, though).
My advice for the third is "Stop and meditate for 5-10 minutes". If you don't know how to meditate, learn. It's both simple and challenging (meaning it is inherently good for building focus)
Too big! Seriously, this post contains too many elements to readily reply to in a coherent way.
So I'll just address this:
I can’t read these two quotes side by side and not be confused.
To me, those two quotes are both fair, and the combination of them indicates the reason why you need to acquire a habit of thinking in a way that is both definite and positive: to keep fear in its right place, which is mostly NOT putting on the brakes.
and this:
...But that's not what 'goal setting' feels like to me. I feel increasingly awesome as I get closer towards a goal
On reflection, 'forgetting' is the wrong word here.
We don't default to being definite about anything, least of all our aims. Clear awareness has to be built and maintained, not merely uncovered.
Being wrong on the internet is vastly more impersonal than being wrong in person, as it were. The urge to correct is similar in both cases, but in the in-person case you can suffer clear consequences from others' wrong beliefs (eg. if they are family). There's some overlap with #3 -- consider the common case of the presumption that you are heterosexual and cisgender.
There are also people who say things they know are wrong in order to see what you're made of, if you're a pushover or not. Unlike the online equivalent (trolling), ignoring them is often not effective.
It seems pretty clear to me that not-correcting others can be a self-deceiving behaviour, at minimum.
As someone who was in that position, I dealt with it by saying 'doesn't matter for now'; until you have the habit of noticing positive things in your life, whether they compare favorably to alternatives is besides the point, and by the time you are beginning to acquire the habit, you also begin to calibrate your values better so you know better what exactly you want to label as good.
In short, just aiming for volume of truthful positive statements is enough to start with.
Would I change my values if I knew more? If yes, then I have the wrong values now? If no, but I want others to be happy as well, what then?
I find these particular questions quite hard to think about, so I'll just mention these few thoughts:
There is a reasonable question about why it is that "For group decisions that require unanimity very little passes the process.". How much of this effect is honest difference in values, and how much is mere linguistic artifacts caused by our tiny communication bandwidth and how sloppily we use it.
IMO any CEV algorithm that had any hope of making sense would have to ignore words and map actual concepts together.