All of tomNth's Comments + Replies

tomNth10

Inherent evil is rooted in 2 sources.

1 Palatability is main source of inherent evil.

A fish inside water breath outside suffocating , a man the opposite.

Favorite food vs hated. Nutritional vs poisonous or allergic.

2 competition.

The enemy is enemy because what they do.

That is why inherent evil is a matter of perspective.

The sadist perspective is that the victim's suffering is a good thing. If you like peanuts everyone (those who hate or allergic) ought to eat them. Jocker of mean jokes don't see them as mean just the sharp point of the funny. Cats see the re... (read more)

tomNth10

The problem is guessing what future rich beings value , that we have.

Who knows if Provenance of artifacts (art or otherwise) matters to non Westerners of the future ?

A non physical value have to be both non generatable and worth to curious alien super intelligent beings.

Antiquities have information that can't be guessed and generated , and inform about the first natural intelligence being past.

Human minds before preservation is possible is an antique , an information ; even more then text or paintings.

1JohnGreer
Yes, it's really hard to predict what shifts will happen as we become more and more digital and advanced. Buying and selling human minds might be restricted, though.  I wonder what antiquities will be the most valued.
tomNth10

There are different uses of the word rationality in different contexts , finding which is which is several uses of them.

Even in Plato, Kant, Bertrand Russell , Chomsky and Dennett , there are probebly several uses (some overlape with those of the others and with LW and David Chapman uses).

tomNth20

Social acceptability , that is what all interaction are made off.

 

At the beggining of the pamdemic I wore a mask for non pandemic reason and a person made a joke to me laughing "Is that for the corona virus ?" , months everyone wore them for pandemic reason , and no one made a joke about it (and probebly didn't rembmer their previous attitude).

tomNth20

They use the term Western but talk about people from the US.

1SpectrumDT
And they use the term "Asia" but talk about people from China.
tomNth60

Which is essential and which accidental , the competence or the group ?

A GoSC is a means to an end , the craftsmanship is the end.

When judging an outsider , an Inner Ring care more about group members then competency.

tomNth20

Where is the tip when #57 and #58 are not avoidable and are #34 ?

Many of those tips remind me of the famous tip "It's better to be rich and healthy than poor and sick"

Its technically true but miss the point.

3Rana Dexsin
I think it's sort of inevitable that general-vectors lists like this will have a lot of entries that have the “this is much easier to do when you're already in a good position” property, but that the underlying effect is much more a divergent-feedback property of the environment and not specific to the list. So I'd say something like: 1. It's important not to get stuck in the victim mindset where you give up and/or rebel because you can't do the same things to obtain wins that are easy for people in better situations. In more collective, adversarial situations, the balance of social emotions may skew toward doing otherwise as a tactic, but communities where that's a steady state trend unhealthy in the medium to long term, and I don't think there's a lot of cases where deciding it on your own is actually a win. 2. If you're in a worse situation than allows the direct use of an idea, but not so much worse that there's an uncrossable gap, most of these degrade gracefully to “maybe keep an eye out for this”. I can't afford a second monitor right now (this is true in reality), but I can remember to revisit the idea if I have more money later. But someone who won't realistically be in a position to own any computing devices for the next decade should discard that item entirely. 3. Adjacent to (2), if a gap looks uncrossable but you want it not to be, consider that some of that might be an illusion, and that you might be able to improve your imagination and look for possibilities you've missed. Extending your range of thought is something that's encouraged a lot here. If you hold on too strongly to “you shouldn't even be talking about things like that”, that can set you up to fall into #47 (which I think is one of the more universal ones). 4. All the same, calibration to “what level and type of things people are in a position to care about right now” is one of the big implicit cultural and situational specificity elements I mentioned in passing elsewhere. If you're wa
tomNth10

Rationalism is like climbing stairs , its easier to say then to do , one look up to know the direction no to despair at one's position ,one feel humble that everyone is on a stair some were/when . pride at being higher then other and advancing , and know when to take breaks so one doesn't fall down.

climbing stairs is dangerous , so running up depend on one's condition.

naivete is looking from a certain stair , its justified on its own or looking down on lower stairs , but not when thinking one is at the top.

1Jay
I need to start off by saying that I strongly encourage those who can to achieve fluency with the techniques of rationality. They're often very useful, and not knowing them is often crippling. Having said that, if reason is the only tool in your toolkit you're not likely to get far. Empathy, charisma, confidence, psychology, and physical attractiveness are often even more useful. You are surrounded by seven billion apes who are smart enough to invent nuclear weapons and stupid enough to use them; they are by far the most important part of your environment and Donald Trump is better at manipulating them than Eliezer Yudkowski. Beyond that there are the insights of meta-rationality. If you think of rationality in terms of optimization, meta-rationality is the art of choosing what to optimize. If rationalism is like climbing stairs, meta-rationality is deciding which staircases are worth climbing (there's a lot more to it than that.). What I'm trying to say is- don't be so proud of your rationalism. It's only a part of what you need.