Pizza House will likely be busy because of the hockey game. Maybe Amer’s across the street? They have a large variety of deli sandwiches and frozen yogurt.
Asymmetric
Karma: 172
Meetup : Ann Arbor Area Amalgam of Rationalist-Adjacent Anthropoids: Assemblage at Adam’s
Any LessWrong readers at the University of Michigan?
Want to go; can’t. Any future meetups planned outside of this one?
It seems as though most responses to this comment talk about how learning to cook is a good thing because it helps one pursue other, more universally valuable goals. I definitely agree with this!
But honestly, the thing that makes women angry about the statement is not the first part. It’s the second. Because there are many good reasons to learn how to cook, but the father is only focusing on the pursuit of marriage, as if that’s the foremost goal she should have. The fact that cooking is so important in general exacerbates this—it means that, regardless of all of those other vastly more important reasons, the only one women should care about is their obligation to get married.
Responses that directly refer to your desire to see the women as a person, as opposed to objectifying her through catcalls etc. or putting her on a pedestal because of her gender.
Therefore, responses that don’t work are motivated out of a desire to protect the woman because she is a woman, rather than because she is a person. “That’s a rude thing to say to a woman” is therefore worse than a simple “that’s rude”.
The idea of “white knighting” is distasteful because people consider white knights to be motivated to protect women because they are women. Removing that aspect gets rid of the white knighting.
If anyone still thinks you’re motivated by a desire to protect women because they are women, you could retort with, “she’s a person. She has feelings like anyone else.”
If male readers feel uncomfortable with the lack of characterization and stereotyping of male characters, and subsequently realize that female readers can feel similarly uncomfortable with all media that fails the Bechdel test (a significant amount), then they can conclude that it’s disturbing to think of a world where a gender is reduced to those kinds of stereotypes.
Of course, it’s possible to miss one of those elements of the chain—not feeling uncomfortable in the first place, for example.
But then, it’s also possible for them to recognize that some people feel uncomfortable while experiencing specific media and feeling enough empathy to relate to them, even if they don’t feel uncomfortable themselves.
Minus the catcalling, too, I assume?
To people who go to meetups in other parts of the world: are they all like this? How do they vary in terms of satisfaction and progress in achieving goals?
Somehow the phrase “existential depression” clicked with me. For context, I’m an otherwise cheery person who breaks down with terrible fear (sometimes involving crying episodes) when I contemplate death. The fear generally lasts for a few hours, but is extremely potent.
Are there instances of existential depression which are more chronic, as opposed to acute, like mine? Is that what the phrase is referring to?
I wasn’t involved in the editing process, so I don’t know if you address this in future chapters, but it seems as though most people who are commenting on Equestria Daily are rejecting the concept of uploading because it would be “like dying” (similar to the Star Trek transporter thought experiment). I hope that this fear is addressed comprehensively because it seems like a major deterrence for people who would otherwise be supportive of the idea.
Also, I think that the people who “know how the story ends” because they’ve read about robot apocalypse analogues before are entirely missing the point, and I hope that gets expressed in the story somewhere as well.
And (as a history and archiving dork), I hope that people don’t forget what came before the utopia. To lose that much human history would be devastating for me. Although I’m not sure if it goes against Celestia’s programming—people could know about the time before ponies and still have their values maximized through friendship and ponies.
How about adding “international conflict (or lack thereof)” as another dimension? The space race, after all, occurred (and is discussed) largely in the context of the cold war.
So a fantastic scenario would be that there is no such conflict, and it’s developed multinationally and across multinational blocs; a pretty good scenario would be that two otherwise politically-similar countries compete for prestige in being the first to develop FAI (which may positively affect funding and meme-status, but negatively affect security), and a sufficiently good scenario would be that the competition is between different political blocs, who nonetheless can recognize that the development of FAI means making their own political organizations obsolete.
There should be a branch of CFAR on the east coast.
Answered everything, including the extra credit questions, except for the official IQ question and the question concerning income (I’m a student in highschool and I don’t have paid work, although I do volunteer).
I also hope that the what the quiz means by “progressive” is also what I mean by “progressive”.
Anyhow, excited to see the results!
Unrelated: They did that in a movie called Primer, which I recommend to people who like MOR and deciphering probably-correct engineering-speak.
Considering that at least part of the correct solution was found within 24 hours, I think you’re right, Locke. It might affect accessibility, though—I know I would be sad if I logged on only to find that the discussion had closed already.
Having read through the speculation, I even found most of the chapter quite anticlimactic. Recognizing the correct predictions removed all the tension, since MOR’s tension relies so much on plotting.
That said, though, reading through the discussion gave me a harmless and very insightful lesson into how predictions work. I learned what makes a prediction probable versus plausible, in a way that not only allows me to understand it, but to think about how I would apply it to my life (I hadn’t really internalized that the percents of all possible outcomes have to add to a hundred, even though in hindsight that’s fairly obvious. I also learned about the betting-real-money threshold).
All in all, despite getting in the way of the chapter, it was a nice, closed-environment rationalist lesson. Thank you for prompting the discussion, Eliezer!
How likely do you all think it is that Harry will defeat Voldemort (as per the prophesy) by the end of his first year?
We need a new discussion thread. Anyone want the dubious honor of making it?
Am interested!