Voted CC-BY-SA, want CC-BY-SA with opt-out ability. I don’t imagine it being used often, but if someone really wants it, it should be there.
BrassLion
Karma: 406
Gandhi and Marting Luther King, Jr. are the headliners, as usual. Both used pacificism as a tool against regimes that, in the end, needed to think of themselves as decent people, and that had to bow to political pressure both at home and abroad. There’s far more examples, though, that people don’t think about—when you’re looking for social change in the modern first world, non-violence is the default. Women’s rights were secured without violence. Black civil rights in America were gained through non-violent activists like King and through the courts—there were violence groups like the Black Panthers, but in the end King’s approach worked and violence… just didn’t. Gay rights might be another example, although gays are marginalized, but not powerless, since they can show up anywhere—still, the gay rights movement has been well organized, never used violence, and has brought the first world to the point where full equality for homosexuals seems inevitable in about a generation.
I think this is an overreation to (deleted thing) happening, and the proposed policy goes too far. (Deleted thing) was neither a good idea or good to talk about in this public forum, but it was straight-out advocating violence in an obvious and direct way, against specific, real people that aren’t in some hated group. That’s not okay and it’s not good for community for the reasons you (EY) said. But the proposed standard is too loose and it’s going to have a chilling effect on some fringe discussion that’s probably going to be useful in teasing out some of the consquences of ethics (which is where this stuff comes up). Having this be a guideline rather than a hard rule seems good, but it still seems like we’re scarring on the first cut, as it were.
I think we run the risk of adopting a censorship policy that makes it difficult to talk about or change the censorship policy, which is also a really terrible idea.
I agree with the general idea of protecting LW’s reputation to outsiders. After all, if we’re raising the sanity waterline (rather than researching FAI), we want outsiders to become insiders, which they won’t do if they think we’re crazy.
“No advocating violence against real world people, or opening a discussion on whether to commit violence on real world people” seems safe enough as a policy to adopt, and specific enough to not have much of a chilling effect on discussion. We ought to restrict what we talk about as little as possible, in the absence of actual problems, given that any posts we don’t want here can be erased by a few keystrokes from an admin.
Non-violent action has a reasonable track record, considering how rarely it’s been used in an organized way by the oppressed. The track record is particularly good in the first world, where people care about appearances.
You should try the hot water thing if you haven’t actually done so. The cost is pretty much zero.
Have you tried filtering your water, or drinking it very cold? Water tastes like what’s in it, and the taste varies depending on the source. Most city water tastes like the chemicals they use to clean it, while water from a cheap filter tastes like nothing. Cold water also seems to have less taste, or at least I’ve found I can’t detect the taste of cold water (as in, with ice in it, not just cold from the tap).
Seltzer (Or whatever they called carbonated water in your part of the world) is another “almost-water” drink, much like tea. No calories, enough taste to notice, feels like soda.
I’m male. The anecdoes above are only not shocking to me because I’ve read a bunch of geek feminism / feminism by geeks before.
Interestingly, group rituals purely for the sake of group bonding needn’t be irrational. It’s irrational to believe that God is going to punish you if you eat leavened bread during Passover—I am caricacturizing Jewish theology here but the general point is sound—but it can be useful to set a test for group membership, or an action to marks you as part of a group, to help group cohesion. This is particularly useful if you’re up against other groups that would like to exploit you and you need as much help as possible to stay together so your group can put up a united front. Arbitrary dietary restrictions seem like a decent way to do that.
Not that anyone actually sat down and thought it out like this before deciding that Jews should abstain from leavened bread for a week every spring, or that Mormons shouldn’t drink alchohol, and so on. But I think there’s value in having an arbitrary ritual explicitly for the sake of group cohesion.
You have the right conclusion but the wrong reason. Most people would appreciate being thought of in a disaster, so calling him if he’s alive would be good—except that the phone networks, particularly cell networks, tend to be crippled by overuse in sudden disasters. Staying off the phones if you don’t need to make a call helps with this.
Anchoring, thus random number generator a question earlier.
Took it.
Interesting, I often use a coffee or bathroom break exactly because it allows me to stop working and get up from my desk, whether because I need a change of perspective to think about a problem or because I just don’t feel like working and want to use a socially acceptable method to slack off for ten minutes. Then again, I drink tea instead of coffee, so I don’t have the issue of taking in too much caffine at once and actually harming how I work. YMMV.
Narratives definetly seem to be far mode, yes—you can construct a narrative where you’re a Good Worker or whatnot without actually doing any of the near mode activities. Maybe if you build the narrative consciously, actually trying to construct the proper narrative for your task, you can do the near mode tasks (write code, frex) and refer back to the narrative if you get stuck or start to slack off (a Good Worker wouldn’t slack off on their unit tests, they Have Pride In Their Work and Want To Create Good Products).
It just hit me that Bora Horza Gorbuchul is himself deeply transhuman, even if he scorns the Culture for relying on AI.
Human Revolution focuses explicity on the social effects of uneven distrubution of augmentations. The poor—even much of the middle class—don’t and can’t get augmentations in HR unless they commit crimes to raise the funds or live with incredibly inferior augmentations, and the augmentations also require regular doses of an expensive drug to avoid rejection. There’s a lot going on in HR to make the argument against augmentations plausible, some of which doesn’t map well onto any real-world transhumanist stuff that’s brewing.
Tangent: Do you have a link to a study that backs this up? I’m very interested in it. EDIT: Arg, serves me right for not reading more downthread.
I really like that you did this, jkaufman—it’s good to see a couple breakdowns like this. However, I think this would be best setup as the chance of post-cryonics disasters happening on a yearly basis, so you could modify the final outcome based on a prediction of how long it will take for reviving crynoics patients to be viable. This is harder to do, obviously, but I think it would give a better outcome. The chance of some X-risk before revival are greater if you expect to be preserved for 500 years than if you think we’ll be able to revive cryonics patients in 100 years.
I found that they worked well early, but have mostly lost their power. I think I might try them again, but tweak the length of the work and break cycles—maybe longer cycles of both. The problem for me is finding something to do that works in 5 minute chunks that’s both relaxing (not work) and energizing (gives you the ability to work more), but isn’t so compelling that you take an extra long break to keep doing your break activity.
I find that, even if I mostly ignore them, I still work more and better with Pomodoros. But my baseline level of work is pretty bad.
Is this the same as asking whether there is a 1:1 correspondence between mind states and brain states?
I’m not sure how you would even create a test to distingush these models. I’m not sure if my understanding is incomplete or if that’s a warning sign that they aren’t different or aren’t coherent.
Voted Lean: Death but want to change my answer to “have no bloody clue”. For the record, when I first thought about this I was accept: death.
Can we be less rude to people that aren’t used to our community’s discussion norms? Calling someone a parasite isn’t going to convince them of anything, and we want people like Rick to engage with us instead of just exchange some money and ignore the community.