EMILY’s List, founded in the 1980′s, fundraises for pro-choice female political candidates. I’d heard of it but was surprised how successful it had been.
he introduces a concept called a “nacknick”, where things that are “suitably similar in shape” to a given example object are nacknicks, but things that are very differently shaped are not. he thinks this is logically incoherent and goes on to argue that “person” is a concept of this form.
but...most concepts work this way! they are approximate, not amenable to rigorous definition, defined by similarity to a prototypical example. I can live with this!
...this seems to be a big factor in David Chapman’s thinking, why he feels he has to decisively reject things like “philosophy” and “rationalism”, because he apparently fell into severe clinical depression due to the idea that non-rigorous definitions are unacceptable?
this is idiosyncratic. now, i don’t think it’s necessarily avoidable or at all bad for one’s intellectual output to be a mirror of one’s personal concerns. but most depressed people are not depressed about non-rigorous definitions, and most people can handle hearing about non-rigorous definitions without getting depressed. this isn’t some kind of universal root cause of the unhappiness of intellectuals!
speaking as an often-unhappy intellectual, I am FINE with some things not being amenable to rigorous definition but still being real things.
if anything, studying mathematics taught me that the rigorously formalizable and provable is a very tiny slice of the world.
history of AI in the 80′s and 90′s—after the expert systems bust, we got embodied intelligence, genetic algorithms, artificial life (aka cellular automata & evolutionary game theory), Bayesian networks, hidden Markov models, and of course the revival neural nets w/ backprop.
yes, our founding ideas came from a so-called “AI winter”.
they have (AI-enabled) debate mapping, decision making toolkit, educational programs, and something called “Internet Government” which doesn’t exist yet. https://www.internetgovernment.org/
American MTurkers don’t prefer male to female politicians in a simulated voting task; Republicans and male Democrats are about as likely to “vote” for a female as male politician, while female Democrats are more likely to vote for a woman.
it’s mostly IFS-based, which i find not especially useful.
I don’t think it makes sense to conceptualize myself as made of stable sub-personalities, like an internal “cast of characters”.
i can certainly go into a hypnagogic/imaginative trance state and allow such entities to emerge, but if I do a subsequent session, they do not “naturally” emerge the same way again, and it seems like a bad idea to deliberately force or train myself to have sub-personalities.
i either want to observe my mind impartially, seeing it as it is, or I want to shape myself to be be better.
If I don’t naturally already have multiple sub-personalities, artificially inducing them doesn’t seem like an improvement.
I do sometimes find it useful to think of myself as having fluctuating moods, motives, and concerns, and do “dialogue” between the ones that are active at any one time.
but unlike IFS, I don’t expect them to be necessarily permanent, and I don’t necessarily need them to be character-like (having a distinctive appearance, personality, etc.)
moods are styles/vibes that encompass my whole experience of life while I’m in them
motives feel like pressures or inclinations to move/act in a certain direction;
not like little inner people, if anything more like little “simulated/anticipated” muscle movements
concerns might be a type of motive, “i gotta remember to track/account-for/care-about this thing”
again, it’s either an abstract thought or a pattern of muscle-tension/planned-movement/etc. it just is not like a little inner person.
most industrial enzyme generation is fermentation of filamentous fungi—molds like Aspergillus and Penicillium. this is done somewhat differently than yeast or bacterial culture.
https://www.elidourado.com/p/personal-aviation Eli Dourado notes that “light-sport” aircraft FAA certification requirements have expanded, allowing something more like a 4-seat “flying car”-like personal aircraft, with extensive autopilot, to be affordable and legal to fly with an amateur pilot’s license.
links 11/21/2024: https://roamresearch.com/#/app/srcpublic/page/11-21-2024
https://goodscienceproject.org/articles/how-to-actually-reduce-the-administrative-burden-on-research/ instead of needing a majority to repeal rules (public choice works against you) we could instead have a national commission empowered to repeal rules unless vetoed by Congress by a deadline (public choice works for you!)
https://wellcomeleap.org/dr/ Lynne Cox’s program on frailty & resilience
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/EMILY%27s_List
EMILY’s List, founded in the 1980′s, fundraises for pro-choice female political candidates. I’d heard of it but was surprised how successful it had been.
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/j.1475-4975.1979.tb00377.x
Peter Unger, “Why there are no people.”
he introduces a concept called a “nacknick”, where things that are “suitably similar in shape” to a given example object are nacknicks, but things that are very differently shaped are not. he thinks this is logically incoherent and goes on to argue that “person” is a concept of this form.
but...most concepts work this way! they are approximate, not amenable to rigorous definition, defined by similarity to a prototypical example. I can live with this!
...this seems to be a big factor in David Chapman’s thinking, why he feels he has to decisively reject things like “philosophy” and “rationalism”, because he apparently fell into severe clinical depression due to the idea that non-rigorous definitions are unacceptable?
this is idiosyncratic. now, i don’t think it’s necessarily avoidable or at all bad for one’s intellectual output to be a mirror of one’s personal concerns. but most depressed people are not depressed about non-rigorous definitions, and most people can handle hearing about non-rigorous definitions without getting depressed. this isn’t some kind of universal root cause of the unhappiness of intellectuals!
speaking as an often-unhappy intellectual, I am FINE with some things not being amenable to rigorous definition but still being real things.
if anything, studying mathematics taught me that the rigorously formalizable and provable is a very tiny slice of the world.
https://cacm.acm.org/opinion/between-the-booms-ai-in-winter/
history of AI in the 80′s and 90′s—after the expert systems bust, we got embodied intelligence, genetic algorithms, artificial life (aka cellular automata & evolutionary game theory), Bayesian networks, hidden Markov models, and of course the revival neural nets w/ backprop.
yes, our founding ideas came from a so-called “AI winter”.
https://www.societylibrary.org/ has gotten a lot bigger with a recent funding infusion.
they have (AI-enabled) debate mapping, decision making toolkit, educational programs, and something called “Internet Government” which doesn’t exist yet. https://www.internetgovernment.org/
https://www.cesifo.org/DocDL/cesifo1_wp11414.pdf
American MTurkers don’t prefer male to female politicians in a simulated voting task; Republicans and male Democrats are about as likely to “vote” for a female as male politician, while female Democrats are more likely to vote for a woman.
https://www.lesswrong.com/s/qXZLFGqpD7aeEgXGL Richard Ngo’s “Replacing Fear” sequence.
it’s mostly IFS-based, which i find not especially useful.
I don’t think it makes sense to conceptualize myself as made of stable sub-personalities, like an internal “cast of characters”.
i can certainly go into a hypnagogic/imaginative trance state and allow such entities to emerge, but if I do a subsequent session, they do not “naturally” emerge the same way again, and it seems like a bad idea to deliberately force or train myself to have sub-personalities.
i either want to observe my mind impartially, seeing it as it is, or I want to shape myself to be be better.
If I don’t naturally already have multiple sub-personalities, artificially inducing them doesn’t seem like an improvement.
I do sometimes find it useful to think of myself as having fluctuating moods, motives, and concerns, and do “dialogue” between the ones that are active at any one time.
but unlike IFS, I don’t expect them to be necessarily permanent, and I don’t necessarily need them to be character-like (having a distinctive appearance, personality, etc.)
moods are styles/vibes that encompass my whole experience of life while I’m in them
motives feel like pressures or inclinations to move/act in a certain direction;
not like little inner people, if anything more like little “simulated/anticipated” muscle movements
concerns might be a type of motive, “i gotta remember to track/account-for/care-about this thing”
again, it’s either an abstract thought or a pattern of muscle-tension/planned-movement/etc. it just is not like a little inner person.
most industrial enzyme generation is fermentation of filamentous fungi—molds like Aspergillus and Penicillium. this is done somewhat differently than yeast or bacterial culture.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solid-state_fermentation it’s most efficient and cheapest to grow these filamentous fungi on solid plant matter with only a little bit of fluid.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9025306/
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7123961/
https://microbialcellfactories.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/1475-2859-10-68
https://www.redalyc.org/journal/1871/187158163062/html/
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5358476/
https://defoortconsultant.com/bio-economy-and-technology-the-challenges-of-industrial-fermentation/
https://www.susupport.com/knowledge/fermentation/challenges-microbial-fermentation-manufacturing
https://www.davidmoore.org.uk/21st_Century_Guidebook_to_Fungi_PLATINUM/REPRINT_collection/Pandy_solid-state-fermentn2003.pdf
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2452072116300144
https://www.elidourado.com/p/personal-aviation Eli Dourado notes that “light-sport” aircraft FAA certification requirements have expanded, allowing something more like a 4-seat “flying car”-like personal aircraft, with extensive autopilot, to be affordable and legal to fly with an amateur pilot’s license.