Yesterday I got what was probably a mass email to all of someone’s friends, but phrased as a personal request, “Would you please do me this huge favor? Read (this Kickstarter project) and forward it on if you agree with it.” I read the Kickstarter project; it was obviously hopeless. And since I’d recently gotten bitten on it, I managed to disagree with the internal part that said, “If you don’t explain why this is doomed, nobody will ever tell it to this person; you are the only one who is willing to accept any personal cost, like loss of relationship-points, to bring a benefit to others, like warning them about a doomed project” with the recently formed heuristic “Assume anyone below the level of Julia is probably outside the tiny class of people who experience anything but useless pain on hearing their personal ideas specifically contradicted with any amount of politeness I know how to wield, until specific evidence to the contrary has been gathered in some low-cost way.”
Techniques used:
1) Actually update on the evidence eventually.
2) Talk to other people out loud about the problems I’ve been having about updating on this evidence in hopes this causes my brain to actually remember next time what happened last time.
Technique it seems like I could’ve used but didn’t explicitly invoke:
Was a high-level skeptic before she was a CFAR instructor—I would guess that most of her accumulated skill is still from outside our Conspiracy—the point being that there are people like this outside the community (“Muggleborns”), they just have skeptic blogs or something.
Google it and you land on a promised book by Howard Bloom, which also promotes “heresies” like “a does not equal a” and “one plus one does not equal two”, as a way to understand “how a godless cosmos creates”.
So these are deliberately paradoxical slogans, being used to hype what may be quite mundane insights. “Entropy is wrong” could just mean “despite the second law, growth and evolution are possible”.
So these are deliberately paradoxical slogans, being used to hype what may be quite mundane insights. “Entropy is wrong” could just mean “despite the second law, growth and evolution are possible”.
So they could have said… “There is plenty of neg-entropy out there. Burn it to make fun stuff happen!”?
Google it and you land on a promised book by Howard Bloom, which also promotes “heresies” like “a does not equal a” and “one plus one does not equal two”, as a way to understand “how a godless cosmos creates”.
I really hope this piece of crackpottery does not reach its target.
ETA: Well, it did, which I guess was inevitable. I just read the Kickstarter TOS, and I can’t see any prohibition against gaming their system for publicity instead of raising money, by donating to your own Kickstarter to reach its target, then getting most of your own money back. So it wouldn’t be libellous to speculate if this had just happened.
Seven people have put in $700 each. I’m hoping it’s the author putting in money to make the project look good, but I have no strong reason to think that’s the case.
What’s really annoying is that “how a godless universe creates” is actually a question that probably needs to be answered more times, or at least I was explaining to a friend that there’s no evidence that life needs more than time and randomness to come into existence.
Yesterday I got what was probably a mass email to all of someone’s friends, but phrased as a personal request, “Would you please do me this huge favor? Read (this Kickstarter project) and forward it on if you agree with it.” I read the Kickstarter project; it was obviously hopeless. And since I’d recently gotten bitten on it, I managed to disagree with the internal part that said, “If you don’t explain why this is doomed, nobody will ever tell it to this person; you are the only one who is willing to accept any personal cost, like loss of relationship-points, to bring a benefit to others, like warning them about a doomed project” with the recently formed heuristic “Assume anyone below the level of Julia is probably outside the tiny class of people who experience anything but useless pain on hearing their personal ideas specifically contradicted with any amount of politeness I know how to wield, until specific evidence to the contrary has been gathered in some low-cost way.”
Techniques used:
1) Actually update on the evidence eventually.
2) Talk to other people out loud about the problems I’ve been having about updating on this evidence in hopes this causes my brain to actually remember next time what happened last time.
Technique it seems like I could’ve used but didn’t explicitly invoke:
3) Stop living in the should-universe.
Julia?
Was a high-level skeptic before she was a CFAR instructor—I would guess that most of her accumulated skill is still from outside our Conspiracy—the point being that there are people like this outside the community (“Muggleborns”), they just have skeptic blogs or something.
Julia Galef, I guess.
What was the project about and why was it obviously hopeless?
“Entropy is wrong” is where I stopped reading the Kickstarter.
Wow. What can that phrase even mean?
… morally :P
Good point. Screw entropy. :P
Uhm, time should run backwards?
Philip K. Dick did say that it should run backwards! I forgot how his line went, though.
Uhm, time should run backwards?
Google it and you land on a promised book by Howard Bloom, which also promotes “heresies” like “a does not equal a” and “one plus one does not equal two”, as a way to understand “how a godless cosmos creates”.
So these are deliberately paradoxical slogans, being used to hype what may be quite mundane insights. “Entropy is wrong” could just mean “despite the second law, growth and evolution are possible”.
Fundraising is the mind-killer.
So they could have said… “There is plenty of neg-entropy out there. Burn it to make fun stuff happen!”?
I really hope this piece of crackpottery does not reach its target.
ETA: Well, it did, which I guess was inevitable. I just read the Kickstarter TOS, and I can’t see any prohibition against gaming their system for publicity instead of raising money, by donating to your own Kickstarter to reach its target, then getting most of your own money back. So it wouldn’t be libellous to speculate if this had just happened.
Here is the relevant kickstarter. It’s a kickstarter for a media campaign to promote an already-written book.
Ugh, it puts a review of itself at every pledge level.
Shoot me now. No cryonics.
Seven people have put in $700 each. I’m hoping it’s the author putting in money to make the project look good, but I have no strong reason to think that’s the case.
What’s really annoying is that “how a godless universe creates” is actually a question that probably needs to be answered more times, or at least I was explaining to a friend that there’s no evidence that life needs more than time and randomness to come into existence.