It is a false dilemma, but the Super Happies won’t give you one half without the other, I fear.
Articulator
Karma: 123
I think rather a lot of people view it as a means of reproduction first and foremost, and may even attempt to ignore the pleasure.
Eliezer may think so, but I have feeling that this is at least partially foreshadowing a disconnect between these future humans’ values and our own.
This comment, archaeologically excavated in the future, amuses me.
And at the same time, they were both victims, as are we all, of human nature. Never let it be said that if you are a victim, you are only a victim.
They’ve done a really good job of making it a pejorative. Anything’s a slur if you hate them enough.
I mean, charitably speaking, I imagine that the second-to-last paragraph could easily have been an argument from consequences, rather than rape apology.
The parable doesn’t really characterize the boy as right, rather as desperate. I don’t think that it’s unreasonable to make an argument that some rapists are desperate for sex, nor that if fewer men were desperate for sex, there’d be less rape. Not saying it’s true necessarily, but that it’s at least arguable. That doesn’t mean women should be forced into sex, of course, but it could still be true at the same time that there would be less rape if men weren’t so desperate.
Maybe it’s because I identify with the boy to an extent, but I don’t think that this is really a moral piece, rather an emotional piece. This is the boy’s journey, his perception. I’m sure that it could describe many people reasonably accurately. I will note that the author narrates, but does not pass judgement through narration, only characters.
I think that some people here might be having so much trouble with this because they think that feeling bad for the boy means that women should be forced to have sex, and resent being forced to agree one way or the other. This is a wrong question.
You can feel sorry for the boy and not condone the second-to-last paragraph, whether it actually symbolized rape or not
You can feel sorry for the boy, even if you don’t think it would be wrong for him to never “have the branch lifted”
You can feel sorry for the boy and still condemn any other part of this story
Reasonable responses:
“I wish you didn’t have to feel that way.”
“I feel sorry for you, but that doesn’t mean I will have sex with you.”
“I feel sorry for you, but that doesn’t justify rape.”
There are a lot of false dichotomies of blame to fall into here, especially given that this is a parable, and a highly charged one at that. Please try to avoid them.
To the people who suggest that one finds other ways of coping, I look forward to you putting your money where your mouth is and being celibate for 20-40 years to show us the way. While this is a decidedly less black and white topic than most minority disputes, the idea that a member of the outgroup should claim to know the experience of the ingroup better than the ingroup is one that is a very common (and incredibly rude) fallacy, so I should certainly hope that no one falls for that trap, especially if you are part of another minority.
Pretty sure that the average IQ on LessWrong is above the mean, though. Therefore, a group with higher variance is more likely to have member in LessWrong.
The causality of that statement is atrocious, but I think the overall picture should still come through.
The first rule of Transfiguration: you do not guess.
Harry proposed a hypothesis, but no further testing was committed. Without knowledge of PT, I’d rate the inability to transfigure all air (as a conceptually-singular entity) as an equally (or more) probable explanation.
That was prior to PT.
This looks really interesting—do you have a timeframe on a playable demo, Kaj?
I sympathize with you on the Java—easier than most other methods, but oh god the lack of style. I think even just making those choice buttons a little less default (non-serif font, lose the blue shading) could move it a fair way toward being presentable.
My primary concern currently is that even if you have a robust engine to abstract much of the coding, this looks like it would have a very poor input to output time ratio. Do you have any plans for circumventing that, or do you have enough time to brute force it?
[I’m probably going to be the latest in a long line of people saying something like this, but I hope my wording, at least, makes this worth existing.]
“I think, therefore I am” is, in fact, deductive reasoning. The definition of “I am”, as thought in the first person, as far as we can comprehend it, means “I think”.
“I think, therefore I think” Or, more simply, “I think”. The statement itself, as we are thinking it, cannot possibly be false—no matter the Demons we posit, we cannot be in simultaneous states of comprehending and not thinking.
“I am”, by our very definitions, must be true for everyone who is reading this, as you are reading it. Because you are reading it.
I’m sorry, Eliezer, but I think you are mistaken if you think you can disprove “I am”, thought in the first person.
Fundamentally, the problem is that you need to get the energy somewhere. Currently, we get it indirectly from sunlight. In a world with no ability to obtain sunlight (as the justification of the Matrix goes), the second law means that barring geothermal (which doesn’t require humans as a go-between), the total usable energy will decrease to zero.
It’s like recycling. Can you ever expect to get better materials, or more materials than you started with without putting anything else in? (Including energy)
Thinking about this in terms of AGI, would it be reasonable to suggest that a bias must be created in favor of utilizing inductive reasoning through Bayes’ Theorem rather than deductive reasoning when and if the two conflict?
Excellent! Thanks for the mathematical model! I’ve been trying to work out how to describe this principle for ages.
With all due respect, I feel like this subject is somewhat superfluous. It seems to be trying to chop part of a general concept off into its own discrete category.
This can all be simplified into accepting that Expert and Common majority opinion are both types of a posteriori evidence that can support an argument, but can be overturned by better a posteriori or a priori evidence.
In other words, they are pretty good heuristics, but like any heuristics, can fail. Making anything more out of it seems to just be artificial, and only necessary if the basic concept proves to difficult to understand.
I don’t think it is so much that it suggests Theism is useful—rather that Theism is a concept which tends to propagate itself effectively, of which usefulness is one example. Effectively brainwashing participants at an early age is another. There almost certainly several factors, only some of which are good.
Or, perhaps, the “if” rightly implied a hypothetical scenario, and the contents of the room as he perceived them were entirely irrelevant.
Point. They are, however, nowhere near as robust as the ROM of old, and are often not truly ROM at all, so I wasn’t really thinking of them in that category. Technically, you are correct, though.
The same can be said of the written English language (or just language in general). I expect, that with time and patience, it would be perfectly possible to reconstruct the system needed to read a data format, just from the data format itself. Harder, certainly, with more layers of encoding, but by degree, not kind.
If we are attempting to preserve data beyond the point where the human race can look after it themselves, chances are that any information at all, regardless of storage medium, will require a fair bit of detective work, decryption, and translation.
To clarify, I was entirely replying to Dagon. I have no quarrel with your post itself in the slightest.