A new arrival, Kouran, recently challenged our conventional use of the label "rational" to describe various systems. The full thread is here, and it doesn't summarize neatly, but he observes that we often use "rational" in the context of non-intellectual, non-cognitive, etc. systems, and that this is an unconventional use...
Related to the recurring topic of akrasia and anticipated near-mode losses, here's an article about "Gym-Pact," an arrangement whereby people precommit to pay penalty fees if they don't stick to their planned workout schedules. In other words, they aren't charging customers money in exchange for a service, nor for violating...
Habit. It helps to get enough sleep.
Don't worry, it will have been available in 2017 one of these days.
So, on one level, my response to this is similar to the one I gave (a few years ago) [http://lesswrong.com/lw/qx/timeless_identity/9trc]... I agree that there's a personal relationship with BtVS, just like there's a personal relationship with my husband, that we'd want to preserve if we wanted to perfectly preserve me.
I was merely arguing that the bitlength of that personal information is much less than the actual information content of my brain, and there's a great deal of compression leverage to be gained by taking the shared memories of BtVS out of both of your heads (and the other thousands of viewers) and replacing them with pointers to a common library representation... (read more)
"So long as your preferences are coherent, stable, and self-consistent then you should be fine."
Yes, absolutely.
And yes, the fact that my preferences are not coherent, stable, and self-consistent is probably the sort of thing I was concerned about... though it was years ago.
You mean that it didn't happen here or in the global society?
I mean that it's unlikely that "the site [would] end up with a similar "rational" political consensus if political discussion went through".
Discussions about religion seems to me to be equally unproductive in general.
In the global society? I agree.
I can imagine that if the site endorsed a political ideology its readers would may become biased forward it (even if just by selection of readers).
Sure, that's possible.
But there is a possibility that that happened with the religion issue.
Sure, that's possible.
Also, let me cut to the chase a little bit, here.
The subtext I'm picking up from our exchange is that you... (read more)
Yup, agreed with all of this. (Well, I do think we have had discussions about which political ideology is correct, but I agree that we shy away from them and endorse political discussions about issues.)
Aren't people on LessWrong quite good at solving their own problems?
Nah, not necessarily. Merely interested in better ways of doing so. (Among other things.)
Yeah, there's a communally endorsed position on which religion(s) is/are correct ("none of them are correct"), but there is no similar communally endorsed position on which political ideology(ies) is/are correct.
There's also no similar communally endorsed position on which brand of car is best, but there's no ban on discussion of cars, because in our experience discussions of car brands, unlike discussions of political ideologies, tend to stay relatively civil and productive.
What do you think? Would the site end up with a similar "rational" political consensus if political discussion went through?
I find it extremely unlilkely. It certainly hasn't in the past.
This comment taken out of context kind of delighted me.
A new arrival, Kouran, recently challenged our conventional use of the label "rational" to describe various systems. The full thread is here, and it doesn't summarize neatly, but he observes that we often use "rational" in the context of non-intellectual, non-cognitive, etc. systems, and that this is an unconventional use of the word.
Unsurprisingly, this led to Standard Conversation Number 12 about how we don't really use "rational" to mean what the rest of the world means by it, and about instrumental rationality, and etc. and etc. In the course of that discussion I made the observation a couple of times (here and here) that we could probably substitute some form of "optimal"... (read 255 more words →)
Related to the recurring topic of akrasia and anticipated near-mode losses, here's an article about "Gym-Pact," an arrangement whereby people precommit to pay penalty fees if they don't stick to their planned workout schedules.
In other words, they aren't charging customers money in exchange for a service, nor for violating an agreement associated with a service... rather, they are charging money as a service.
Had I encountered this in fiction, I would have considered it satire.
(I'm being somewhat glib here, admittedly: in this "experimental" phase, they are giving people free gym memberships as part of the deal, and using the penalty fees to pay for the memberships. But that doesn't sound like the ultimate business model.)
Back when this was a big part of my professional life, my reply was "everything takes a month."