All of seuoseo's Comments + Replies

It takes humbtion to post here these days (this is a joke, sorry).

5[anonymous]
I like that neologism, thanks for sharing it. I googled it to find this: -Jane Harper, a 30-year veteran of IBM, and a group of her colleagues

Keeping costly promises/contracts after changing into someone who no longer would have agreed to them.

...oh. I was about to PM you with a personal account from the other side of the story to defend the people I thought you were accusing of not saving you, personally, at a small cost or themselves. I still want to point out that had I read your story in the past, I would have taken it for an accusation of practically murdering someone like the author and tortured myself over it.

I'm technically on LessWrong and my biggest reason was desperation. I could PM you most of their answer if you're curious.

5username2
Don't PM me! This account is public, anyone can use it.

You got me, there was no real question. It was all made up for fun. It would be fun to know of a rationalist's experience and interpretation or desire to visit a psychic and whatever unusual circumstances and reasoning led them to it.

1ChristianKl
Even conditional on someone having those experiences I find it unlikey that the person would write an reply to a question on LW that posed as the question above.

Can you think of any good reason to consult any so called psychic?

0username2
Follow up question: has anyone on LessWrong ever actually consulted a psychic for any reason?
[anonymous]100

Cold reading and externalizing your unconscious thoughts so as to allow conscious consideration thereof are very useful things sometimes. As can sometimes be manipulating symbols so as to deeply seat changes to said thoughts. There's a great big grab-bag of tricks that human societies have come up with to do these things over the millennia including some activities practiced by the more interesting subsets of individuals using that label.

There are spaces within the occult philosophy scene that effectively say, for example, things like that coincidences... (read more)

7IlyaShpitser
Good ones are good judges of character. Might want to befriend one rather than be a client, though.

Can you think of any good reason to consult any so called psychic?

I can think of a good reason for anything. I ask my brain "conditional upon it being a good idea, what might the situation be?" and the virtual outcome pump effortlessly generates scenarios. A professional fiction writer could produce a flood of them. Try it! For any X whatever, you can come up with answers to the question "what might the world look like, conditional upon X being a good idea?" For extreme X's, I recommend not publishing them. If you find yourself being... (read more)

0[anonymous]
I can think of a good reason for anything. I ask my brain "conditional upon it being a good idea, what might the situation be?" and the virtual outcome pump effortlessly generates scenarios. A professional fiction writer could produce a flood of them. Try it! For any X whatever, you can come up with answers to the question "what might the world look like, conditional upon X being a good idea?" For extreme X's, I recommend not publishing them. Why consult a psychic? Because I have seen reason to think that this one is the real deal. To humour a friend who believes in this stuff. For entertainment. To expose the psychic as a fraud. To observe and learn from their cold reading technique. To audition them for a stage act. Because they're offering a free consultation and I think, why not? (Don't worry, my virtual outcome pump can generate reasons why not just as easily as reasons why.) What is the real question here?

Does occam's razor require you to prefer the likelier hypothesis? I don't see why I should act as if the more likely case is definitely true.

How often do they actually execute those arrested for buying drugs, as opposed to other punishments? Is the chance of "success" even bigger than that of suicide by hanging, for example? Because ending up imprisoned is not necessarily better than ending up mutilated. On the other hand, if someone is going to purchase illegal drugs for an overdose, is there any reason not to do it in a country with capital punishment as opposed to one in which they'd definitely face years in prison? (OK, those aren't the only two options...)

0[anonymous]
Singapore was used as the specific example because execution is mandatory for certain quantities and they have a track record of staying true to that. The main issue is rather that in countries like Singapore, there is minimal demand for drugs relative to countries with worse law enforcement, lowering the criminal profitability.

I got 65%, but don't have the karma to vote.

1Gunnar_Zarncke
For those reading only: The current state is 17 votes, median 67, mean 66.795. This is significantly below the population average. I wonder about the cause...
3gjm
I am about to submit an (anon) 65% vote to make up for this. [EDITED to add:] Now done. (Of course the reason for the two-phase approach, as opposed to just doing it, was to minimize the risk of two people doing it concurrently.)

This was harsh but interesting. I watched bits of the special for the first time to try to come up with something more charitable. Charlie Brown is depressed and consequentially fails to find anything enjoyable, meaningful and easy. Social interaction obviously suffers too with everyone else being equally clueless about his state of mind and attributing his actions to the wrong causes. But he does realize something's wrong and he voices his desire to find a way to enjoy life. And since he tries different things instead of dismissing them, eventually someth... (read more)