When it comes to your paper I think it falls into the “too vague to be wrong” category.
If you want to convince rationalists that “love is real”, your first issue is that this is a vague three-word slogan that doesn’t directly make any predictions where we can check whether or not those predictions are true.
I tried to justify it through a model of recurrence and self-similarity in consciousness, but clearly that’s not sufficient or well articulated enough.
Justification is not how you convince rationalists. Part of what the sequences are about is that rationalists should seek true beliefs and not justified beliefs. For that, you need to attempt to falsify the belief.
One exercise could be for you to just taboo the word love and make your case without it as that will result in you having to think more about what you actually mean.
Ok, this is me discarding my ‘rationalist’ hat, and I’m not quite sure of the rules and norms applicable to shortforms, but I simply cannot resist pointing out the sheer poetry of the situation.
I made a post about unconditional love and it got voted down to the point I didn’t have enough ‘karma’ to post for a while. I’m an immigrant from India and took Sanskrit for six years—let’s just say there is a core epistemic clash in its usage on this site[1]. A (very intelligent and kind) person whose id happens to be Christian takes pity and suggests, among other things, an syntactic distancing from the term ‘love’.
TMI: I’m married to a practicing Catholic—named Christian.
Not complaining—I’m out of karma jail now and it’s a terrific system. Specifically saying that the essence of ‘karma’, etymologically speaking, lies in its intangibility and implicit nature.
Thank you—I agree with you on all counts, and your comment on my thesis needing to be falsifiable is a helpful direction for me to focus.
I alluded to this above—this constraint to operate within provability was specifically what led me away from rationalist thinking a few years ago—I felt that when it really mattered (Trump, SBF, existential risk, consciousness), there tended to be this edge-case Godelian incompleteness when the models stopping working and people ended up fighting and fitting theories to justify their biases and incentives, or choosing to focus instead on the optimal temperature for heating toast.
So for the most part, I’m not very surprised. I have been re-acquainting myself the last couple of weeks to try and speak the language better. However, it’s sad to see, for instance, the thread on MIRI drama, and hard not to correlate that with the dissonance from real life, especially given the very real-life context of p(doom).
The use of ‘love’ and ‘unconditional love’ from the get-go was very intentional, partly because they seem to bring up strong priors and aversion-reflexes, and I wanted to face that head on. But that’s a great idea—to try and arrive at these conclusions without using the word.
Regardless, I’m sure my paper needs a lot of work and can be improved substantially. If you have more thoughts, or want to start a dialogue, I’d be interested.
When it comes to your paper I think it falls into the “too vague to be wrong” category.
If you want to convince rationalists that “love is real”, your first issue is that this is a vague three-word slogan that doesn’t directly make any predictions where we can check whether or not those predictions are true.
Justification is not how you convince rationalists. Part of what the sequences are about is that rationalists should seek true beliefs and not justified beliefs. For that, you need to attempt to falsify the belief.
One exercise could be for you to just taboo the word love and make your case without it as that will result in you having to think more about what you actually mean.
Ok, this is me discarding my ‘rationalist’ hat, and I’m not quite sure of the rules and norms applicable to shortforms, but I simply cannot resist pointing out the sheer poetry of the situation.
I made a post about unconditional love and it got voted down to the point I didn’t have enough ‘karma’ to post for a while. I’m an immigrant from India and took Sanskrit for six years—let’s just say there is a core epistemic clash in its usage on this site[1]. A (very intelligent and kind) person whose id happens to be Christian takes pity and suggests, among other things, an syntactic distancing from the term ‘love’.
TMI: I’m married to a practicing Catholic—named Christian.
Not complaining—I’m out of karma jail now and it’s a terrific system. Specifically saying that the essence of ‘karma’, etymologically speaking, lies in its intangibility and implicit nature.
Thank you—I agree with you on all counts, and your comment on my thesis needing to be falsifiable is a helpful direction for me to focus.
I alluded to this above—this constraint to operate within provability was specifically what led me away from rationalist thinking a few years ago—I felt that when it really mattered (Trump, SBF, existential risk, consciousness), there tended to be this edge-case Godelian incompleteness when the models stopping working and people ended up fighting and fitting theories to justify their biases and incentives, or choosing to focus instead on the optimal temperature for heating toast.
So for the most part, I’m not very surprised. I have been re-acquainting myself the last couple of weeks to try and speak the language better. However, it’s sad to see, for instance, the thread on MIRI drama, and hard not to correlate that with the dissonance from real life, especially given the very real-life context of p(doom).
The use of ‘love’ and ‘unconditional love’ from the get-go was very intentional, partly because they seem to bring up strong priors and aversion-reflexes, and I wanted to face that head on. But that’s a great idea—to try and arrive at these conclusions without using the word.
Regardless, I’m sure my paper needs a lot of work and can be improved substantially. If you have more thoughts, or want to start a dialogue, I’d be interested.
If you want we can try LessWrong dialogue feature to narrow the discussion.