All of tmgerbich's Comments + Replies

Updating one's unconsciously regulated social behavior is impossible in the general case, and in most of the desirable >concrete cases too.

I don't see why that should necessarily be the case. It would simply require specifying the desired behavior and bringing it into the realm of the conscious until the new behavior is learned.

For example, if I were able to realize that a major barrier to my social communication is my lack of eye contact, I could make a deliberate effort to always make eye contact when having conversations. Ideally this behavior would eventually become internalized, but even if it didn't there's no actual reason why I couldn't keep it up for the rest of my life.

What motivation do people with social skills and those norms have to help those with less social skills? >Because unless there's something in it for them they're not doing it. Many of the kind of people who have >social skills find hanging out with the kind of people who don't actively unpleasant.

I would say that if the people with the high social skills have the option of removing the people with low social skills from the group then there is little/no incentive to help them beyond perhaps altruism.

But in many situations these mixed groups are fo... (read more)

There is a deep, bad problem with "if you can't read cues, go fuck yourself".

I'm not fine with there being nothing you can do given unclear cues. The cost of two people who wanted to hug not >hugging is negligible; the cost of someone being unable of social interaction until someone comes to clue them in >is not.

I don't think that's what I was intending to get at. If you can't read the cues about the appropriateness of a particular course of action then it is advisable to wait until you can ask someone more informed for information about... (read more)

It would be really good to have a definition that had some shreds of objectivity to it.

The problem with this is that there is no objectivity. It's not just about the behavior, or the "perpetrator", or the "victim". It's the intersection of all of them and it's basically dependent on how the "victim" interprets certain aspects of the "perpetrator's" behavior- which is hugely biased by the personal characteristics of the "perpetrator". A hot guy walking up to a girl in a bar is flattering. An ugly guy doin... (read more)

Ask first. Always. For everything. Really.

I'm going to disagree with this. Honestly, straight up asking can be even more creepy in a lot of situations. For example if you ask, "Can I give you a hug?", you've double creeped me out.

First, you violated my boundaries because we're not hugging friends yet if ever. Second, you violated my social norms by not reading our friendship hug level from the vibe of our conversation and my body language. You're right that I may not actually tell you "no" because it is more difficult to opt-out, but... (read more)

I'm a bit late on this, obviously, but I've had a question that I've always felt was a bit too nonsensical (and no doubt addressed somewhere in the sequences that I haven't found) to bring up but it kinda bugs me.

Do we have any ideas/guesses/starting points about whether or not "self-awareness" is some kind of weird quirk of our biology and evolution or if would be be an inevitable consequence of any general AI?

I realize that's not a super clear definition- I guess I'm talking about that feeling of "existing is going on here" and you c... (read more)

So, I tried each of these tests before I saw the answers, and I got them all correct- but I think the only reason that I got them correct is because I saw the statements together. With the exception of the dice-rolling, If you had asked me to rate the probabilities of different events occurring with sufficient time in between for the events to become decoupled in my mind, I suspect the absolute probabilities I would given would be in a different order from how I ordered them when I had access to all of them at once. Having the coupled events listed indepen... (read more)

Hello Less Wrong!

I was on facebook and I saw a wall post about the fanfiction Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality. I haven't read fanfiction much since I was a kid, but the title was intriguing, so I clicked on it and started reading. The ideas were interesting enough that I went to the author's page and it brought me here.

Anyways, I'm a 22 year old female person. I'm graduating from college in 2 weeks with a chemistry major and I have no real plans, so it makes posting about my life situation a little awkward right now. I'll probably be heading ba... (read more)

Wow. So, I'm basically brand new to this site. I've never taken a logic class and I've never read extensively on the subjects discussed here. So if I say something unbearably unsophisticated or naive, please direct me somewhere useful. But I do have a couple comments/questions about this post and some of the replies.

I don't think it's fair to completely discount prayer. When I was a young child, I asked my grandmother why I should bother praying, when God supposedly loved everyone the same and people praying for much more important things didn't get what ... (read more)

How about Gloop, who considers the possibility that the fact that the sky is blue now has no actual bearing on what the color of the sky might have been when the scraps of paper were written? He can entertain the possibility that the composition of the atmosphere might have changed during all the time people spent underground, so he establishes a laboratory to investigate if A) what particles were present in the air at the time the paper was written and B) if they were able to scatter blue or green light more efficiently?