Doug_S.

Karma: 1,354

Doug_S.Jan 9, 2009, 9:05 AM
7 points
on: Serious Stories
In one sense, it’s clear that we do not want to live the sort of lives that are depicted in most stories that human authors have written so far. Think of the truly great stories, the ones that have become legendary for being the very best of the best of their genre: The Iliad, Romeo and Juliet, The Godfather, Watchmen, Planescape: Torment, the second season of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, or that ending in Tsukihime. Is there a single story on the list that isn’t tragic?

In many stories, things go horribly wrong and characters hurt, badly, but in the end, things end up much better than they started. As you say later, it’s often more about the striving than the suffering. Currently, The Shawshank Redemption is sitting at the top of the IMDB Top 250 Movies list. Is that a tragic story? It does have a happy ending, after all.

Incidentally, my favorite movies to watch over and over tend to be comedies. Are Blazing Saddles, Airplane!, and Monty Python and the Holy Grail capital-G Great? How about the works of Gilbert and Sullivan? Mark Twain wrote comedies, and Don Quixote is a comedy, too!

I suspect that comedies tend to be more culture-specific than tragedies; things that were hilarious 300 years ago might just get yawns and blank stares today. On the other hand, some comedies do stand the test of time, they’re just a bit less common. Lysistrata is over 2000 years old and it hasn’t stopped being funny yet, and Don Quixote outlasted the entire genre of stories it was making fun of.

Doug_S.Jan 5, 2009, 6:31 AM
1 point
on: Growing Up is Hard
Oh, about the photographic memory. I’m not sure exactly where I heard it first, but my high school history teacher supported it with a personal anecdote: she once had a student who had what seemed to be a photographic memory, and would frequently answer questions on quizzes with lengthy, direct quotes from the textbook on completely irrelevant subjects.

Anyway, for whatever reason, the brain has a capacity to ignore and forget details it considers unimportant; as one Cesare Mondadori puts it, “maximal memory” and “optimal memory” are not synonymous.

Doug_S.Jan 5, 2009, 6:09 AM
11 points
on: Changing Emotions
frelkins: Well, Ranma isn’t Tiresias. The Ranma ¹⁄₂ manga was written by a woman, if that changes anything.

Here’s a little bit of silliness. Inquest Gamer magazine once ran a poll asking people to choose between various (silly) options of which horrible fate they would prefer to endure. One was a choice between “Randomly change the Magic rules each time you create a killer deck” and “Randomly change your gender each time you go to sleep.” “Gender” won by a large margin.

Doug_S.Jan 5, 2009, 4:52 AM
21 points
on: Changing Emotions
“give you a vagina-shaped penis, more or less”

Nitpick: You’d end up with a clitoris-shaped penis, and a vagina-shaped scrotum. I know this because I’ve read about sexual anatomy and embryonic development on the Internet. The bit of flesh that turns into the penis in a male fetus develops into the clitoris in a female, and the closest male equivalent to the vagina is the scrotum.

Incidentally, simply “wearing a female body like a suit of clothing” and letting the brain react to the different hormones, body shape, etc., with its natural plasticity might be close enough to what people mean, anyway.

(Oh, and Ranma still considers himself male even during those times when he happens to be stuck in a female body for a while.)
What links here?
- CronoDAS's comment on Changing Emotions by Eliezer Yudkowsky (Oct 27, 2013, 2:18 PM; 3 points)

Doug_S.Jan 5, 2009, 4:07 AM
0 points
on: Growing Up is Hard
“Doug S.: do you have any links to that? As described, it sounds like you’re plagiarizing Borges...”

Huh? Links to what?

/me is confused

Doug_S.Jan 4, 2009, 7:17 PM
0 points
on: Growing Up is Hard
(4) Some children learn to read before they are 2.5 years old. From what I know all of these early readers turn out to be autistic.

I’m a living counterexample to this, as I learned to read at basically the same time that I picked up spoken language. I might have slight tendencies toward behavior consistent with autism, but I’m well within the range of “healthy” human variation, at least where the autistic spectrum is concerned. (My mental illnesses tend to run in other directions.)

Doug_S.Jan 4, 2009, 5:36 AM
3 points
on: Growing Up is Hard
Incidentally, a not very well known drawback to “photographic memory” is that people with photographic memories have trouble fitting what they remember into context; their memories tend to end up as disconnected trivia that they don’t quite understand the significance of.

Doug_S.Jan 4, 2009, 4:15 AM
15 points
on: Growing Up is Hard
Well, one earlier limit on the evolution of the human brain is one that most definitely no longer applies to future human augmentation: the skull of a human baby needs to be able to pass through the birth canal without killing the mother, and it just barely does so. Humans have more difficult births than most other animals (at least, that’s the impression I get). Today, we can perform Cesarean deliveries in relative safely, so that gives at least one “freebie” when it comes to improving on the work of the blind idiot god.

Doug_S.Jan 2, 2009, 2:59 AM
2 points
on: Free to Optimize
“So one possible way of helping—which may or may not be the best way of helping—would be the gift of a world that works on improved rules, where the rules are stable and understandable enough that people can manipulate them and optimize their own futures together.”

For some reason, I’m reminded of Dungeons & Dragons, World of Warcraft, and other games...

Doug_S.Dec 31, 2008, 7:48 AM
3 points
on: Dunbar’s Function
When I discuss politics, it’s almost always primarily for the entertainment value. It’s like reading about quantum physics, or how to play better chess.

Doug_S.Dec 31, 2008, 2:56 AM
19 points
on: Dunbar’s Function
Via Scientific American magazine:

Fallacy 3: “Our Modern Skulls House a Stone Age Mind” Pop EP’s claim that human nature was designed during the Pleistocene, when our ancestors lived as hunter-gatherers, gets it wrong on both ends of the epoch.

...

The view that “our modern skulls house a Stone Age mind” gets things wrong on the contemporary end of our evolutionary history as well. The idea that we are stuck with a Pleistocene-adapted psychology greatly underestimates the rate at which natural and sexual selection can drive evolutionary change. Recent studies have demonstrated that selection can radically alter the life-history traits of a population in as few as 18 generations (for humans, roughly 450 years). Of course, such rapid evolution can occur only with significant change in the selection pressures acting on a population. But environmental change since the Pleistocene has unquestionably altered the selection pressures on human psychology. The agricultural and industrial revolutions precipitated fundamental changes in the social structures of human populations, which in turn altered the challenges humans face when acquiring resources, mating, forming alliances or negotiating status hierarchies. Other human activities—ranging from constructing shelter to preserving food, from contraception to organized education—have also consistently altered the selection pressures. Because we have clear examples of post-Pleistocene physiological adaptation to changing environmental demands (such as malaria resistance), we have no reason to doubt similar psychological evolution.

Doug_S.Dec 29, 2008, 11:53 PM
0 points
on: Amputation of Destiny
Off-topic, but amusing:

[Long + off-topic = deleted. Take it to an Open Thread.]

Doug_S.Dec 27, 2008, 3:04 AM
23 points
0
on: Nonperson Predicates
Would a human, trying to solve the same problem, also run the risk of simulating a person?

See also: http://xkcd.com/390/
What links here?
- Z_M_Davis's comment on The Obesity Myth by Matt_Simpson (Jul 30, 2009, 3:57 AM; 3 points)
- Document's comment on Causal Universes by Eliezer Yudkowsky (Aug 17, 2013, 11:01 PM; 0 points)

Doug_S.Dec 26, 2008, 5:24 AM
0 points
on: Harmful Options
frelkins: I agree. I’m just pointing out that, as far as pranks go, there are worse things on the web than Rick Astley music videos.

Doug_S.Dec 25, 2008, 10:20 PM
0 points
on: Harmful Options
I wasn’t too surprised when I saw that the video was Rick Astley. It’s the standard internet prank, these days.

It could be worse, though. At least people have stopped referring people to Goatse, and this never caught on.

Doug_S. 23 Dec 2008 7:54 UTC
1 point
on: Sensual Experience
Technically, most life insurance policies do pay out in the event of suicide, as long as the policy is at least two years old.

Doug_S. 23 Dec 2008 5:23 UTC
0 points
on: Rationality Quotes 20
Some criticism of evolutionary psychology as it is commonly perceived, courtesy of Scientific American.

Doug_S. 21 Dec 2008 21:04 UTC
3 points
on: Sensual Experience
I’d like to interrupt this discussion to ask a question.

A typical “silly question” to ask a theist is, “If heaven is so great, why not kill yourself right now, so you can get there immediately?” The usual answers involve things like “suicide is a sin” and such. (Incidentally, many Islamic suicide bombers use exactly that reasoning to justify their participation in such activities.)

I have a similar question. If you are sufficiently dissatisfied with life in the world as it is, does it make sense to sign up for cryonics and then kill yourself, hoping to “wake up” in a better future, rather than continuing to live in the present until some thing else causes your death?

Doug_S. 21 Dec 2008 2:58 UTC
2 points
on: Sensual Experience
Nitpick:

Isn’t it the nose, rather than the tongue, that’s responsible for much of the sensory variety in food? (Stuff doesn’t taste the same when you have a stuffed nose, for example.)

Doug_S. 20 Dec 2008 9:07 UTC
3 points
on: Complex Novelty
Fun comes from overcoming adversity. If we are so advanced that the natural world no longer offers a significant challenge, obviously the only fun available will be conflict with other intelligences at a similar level of power, so we will probably see a world of continual violent strife.

Strife, yes, I’d expect that. Violent strife, no. At least, no more violent than two people sitting down on opposite sides of a chess board are. You don’t have to fight to the death for there to be enough of a competition to enjoy.