No, I agree strongly with everything that you have said in this entire thread except that any of it had anything to do with the post you were responding to.
A while ago I had a LW discussion about listen to one’s heart. It took me quite a while to get people to consider that some people actually mean the phrase very literally. For them it was just a metaphor that’s in their mind and the phrase had little to do with the actual biological heart.
Let’s take dual-n-back as intervention for improving intelligence. As far as I understand Gwern did run the meta analysis and it doesn’t work for that purpose. Purely mental interventions don’t get you very far. I do advocate that you need to think more about addressing somatic issues if you actually want to build training that improves intelligence.
David Burns who did a lot to popularize Cognitive Behavior Therapy (CBT) with his book “The Feeling Good Handbook” doesn’t call what he does these days Cognitive Behavior Therapy anymore. Just focusing on the mind and the cognition is 20-30 year old thought. Burns nowadays considers it important that patients feel a warm connection with their therapist.
A lot psychology academia is still in that old mental frame. Academia isn’t really where innovation happens.
I do think we have to consider putting people in floating tanks or on treadmills while they do dual-n-back or similar tasks if we want to get strong intelligence improvement to work.
Okay. The thing is, all of that stuff would be allowed under the restriction you were objecting to. Everything you are proposing is working within the system of human biology, optimizing it. You’re not replacing it with something else altogether like computer chips or genetically re-engineering one’s myelin or whatever.
As a reminder, the exchange began:
How much can we raise the sanity waterline without transhumanism (i.e. assuming current human biology is a constant)?
The question presupposes mind body dualism. Biology get’s changed through mental interventions and it’s not at all clear how many interventions are possible.
The thing is, all of that stuff would be allowed under the restriction you were objecting to.
I don’t care that much about what’s allowed but about what people actually do. Even if a nerd intellectually understands that mind-body dualism is wrong, then he can still ignore his body and avoid exercising because he doesn’t get the idea at a deep level.
Why do you consider something that changes hormone levels keeping biology constant but something that changes genes not keeping biology constant?
More importantly, once you understand that there a lot of unexplored space the question of how far we could improve becomes a question that obviously nobody is going to be able to answer.
Couldn’t you have said the interesting parts of that without the aggressive ‘You’re being a mind-body dualist!’ part?
Why would I? One of the core points of the argument is fighting mind-body dualism. It’s the connection to the original sentence I’m challenging. A connection that otherwise didn’t seem obvious to you.
As far as the word “aggressive” goes, challenging ideas at a deep level can raise emotions. I don’t think that’s a reason to avoid deep intellectual debate and only debate superficial issues that don’t raise emotions.
How much can we raise the sanity waterline without transhumanism (i.e. assuming current human biology is a constant)?
The only way I can see this as mind-body dualistic is by taking a very strong, restrictive sense of the phrase ‘human biology’ - one which does not already include those things that humans are biologically capable of without high-technological transhumanist aid. You assumed that the definition in use was one you would strongly disagree with, despite contextual clues that this was not the case: if the poster thinks that transhumanistic modifications CAN impact the sanity waterline, this person is clearly not a mind-body dualist!
Basically, you picked a fight with someone who agreed with you over something you agreed with them about and insisted that they disagreed with you. It’s obnoxious.
I don’t think that’s a reason to avoid deep intellectual debate and only debate superficial issues that don’t raise emotions.
When you’re dealing with emotionally charged issues, you need to be very careful. It’s not the time to run in throwing words into peoples’ mouths.
A while ago I had a LW discussion about listen to one’s heart. It took me quite a while to get people to consider that some people actually mean the phrase very literally. For them it was just a metaphor that’s in their mind and the phrase had little to do with the actual biological heart.
Let’s take dual-n-back as intervention for improving intelligence. As far as I understand Gwern did run the meta analysis and it doesn’t work for that purpose. Purely mental interventions don’t get you very far. I do advocate that you need to think more about addressing somatic issues if you actually want to build training that improves intelligence.
David Burns who did a lot to popularize Cognitive Behavior Therapy (CBT) with his book “The Feeling Good Handbook” doesn’t call what he does these days Cognitive Behavior Therapy anymore. Just focusing on the mind and the cognition is 20-30 year old thought. Burns nowadays considers it important that patients feel a warm connection with their therapist.
A lot psychology academia is still in that old mental frame. Academia isn’t really where innovation happens.
I do think we have to consider putting people in floating tanks or on treadmills while they do dual-n-back or similar tasks if we want to get strong intelligence improvement to work.
Okay. The thing is, all of that stuff would be allowed under the restriction you were objecting to. Everything you are proposing is working within the system of human biology, optimizing it. You’re not replacing it with something else altogether like computer chips or genetically re-engineering one’s myelin or whatever.
As a reminder, the exchange began:
I don’t care that much about what’s allowed but about what people actually do. Even if a nerd intellectually understands that mind-body dualism is wrong, then he can still ignore his body and avoid exercising because he doesn’t get the idea at a deep level.
Why do you consider something that changes hormone levels keeping biology constant but something that changes genes not keeping biology constant?
More importantly, once you understand that there a lot of unexplored space the question of how far we could improve becomes a question that obviously nobody is going to be able to answer.
Couldn’t you have said the interesting parts of that without the aggressive ‘You’re being a mind-body dualist!’ part?
Why would I? One of the core points of the argument is fighting mind-body dualism. It’s the connection to the original sentence I’m challenging. A connection that otherwise didn’t seem obvious to you.
As far as the word “aggressive” goes, challenging ideas at a deep level can raise emotions. I don’t think that’s a reason to avoid deep intellectual debate and only debate superficial issues that don’t raise emotions.
The only way I can see this as mind-body dualistic is by taking a very strong, restrictive sense of the phrase ‘human biology’ - one which does not already include those things that humans are biologically capable of without high-technological transhumanist aid. You assumed that the definition in use was one you would strongly disagree with, despite contextual clues that this was not the case: if the poster thinks that transhumanistic modifications CAN impact the sanity waterline, this person is clearly not a mind-body dualist!
Basically, you picked a fight with someone who agreed with you over something you agreed with them about and insisted that they disagreed with you. It’s obnoxious.
When you’re dealing with emotionally charged issues, you need to be very careful. It’s not the time to run in throwing words into peoples’ mouths.