I put never, but “not anymore” would be more accurate
duckduckMOO
Karma: 97
The writer says “If you insist on telling me anyway, I will nod, say that your argument makes complete sense...” despite knowing perfectly well they can’t tell if the argument makes sense or not.
If, even knowing specifically in this case that you can’t tell if an argument is correct or not, you feel the need to announce that “your argument makes complete sense” your problem is that you believe things without understanding them. Fixing that bad habit might remove the need to not take arguments seriously.
“is valuable to you for discussing weird topics”
“reddit”
pick one.
“That’s not the way it feels” “it feels right”
This is a horrible justification for anything. Doing something bad doesn’t automatically make someone feel bad. It’s an especially bad test of status-seeking’s moral status because (normal) people rarely feel bad about doing something they perceive as normal even if it’s bad. In any case it’s not true that it always feels right, There are constitutional differences from person to person that change how normal everyday status seeking feels: not everyone seeks status for the warm fuzzies, some people seek it because it makes them feel powerful, or important, or to ease their insecurity, or because they think its useful in general, or in a specific case, or because it’s normal and they do normal stuff (perhaps out of habit or an alief that normal=good, some do it to fit in, or because of explicit political calculation or etc etc obviously there are many different possible feelings I can’t think of on the spot.) There are also some means of status seeking that should make most people feel pretty bad, E.g. picking on someone to avoid being picked on yourself, lying to make yourself look good, lying to transfer blame and punishment to someone else etc.
“The term “status” feels kinda dirty when you analyze human interaction from afar.There’s always the subtext that if you play for it, you’re a bad person.”
No there isn’t. Where would the subtext be coming from exactly? This stuff isn’t all written by status haters (I wonder if any significant proportion is) What there is is explicit discussion of stuff that is usually left implicit. Sometimes if someone feels or thinks that it’s bad that’s going to leak through in what they write but this is hardly standard or ever present. If it feels dirty, maybe they mean something else by status than you do, or maybe that’s just how you feel about it when looking from afar (or lots of other possible explanations). There’s no subtext to blame it feeling dirty on.
“It can feel like trying be comfortable talking to that girl at the grocery store.” Insofar as the word status is usefully different from “confidence” it is external. Feeling comfortable talking to someone does not get you status. Appearing to feel comfortable doing so might. The fact that being uncomfortable is uncomfortable* should really be the default explanation for someone trying to stop being uncomfortable. If I feel uncomfortable my default reaction is to try to stop feeling uncomfortable, if the discomfort isn’t more instrumentally useful than annoying , and I’m not too busy. I’m pretty sure that’s not status seeking.
“If you interact with other people at all, I can almost (not quite) guarantee that you seek status, you just don’t call it status.” The OP specifically stated that she did seek status, but that it wasn’t a terminal value.
Also why is human being used as a compliment. It seems like you’re arguing against the idea that this obviously very “human” thing (status seeking) is a bad thing. Using the word human as a compliment kind of presupposes your conclusion.
*and being uncomfortable is bad, and badness is bad, etc, etc.
First off I think that at less wrong you could get better results by including an option on some question that says something to the effect of: those options are such a poor match if I picked one it would make the results worse/add more noise than signal/you would actually lose information if you interpreted it at face value.
With what race do you most identify? Why is this question about racial identification rather than ontological membership? If I’m white but I totally think black people are awesome the instructions tell me to put black which you probably don’t want. Also (sort of) it would be nice to have an option not to racially identify.
With what gender do you primarily identify? This includes an option for other but no option for none. I wouldn’t expect none to be much less common than other.
politics question should have an option or two options for politically averse/uninterested. The current setup unecessarrilly railroads people into appearing to have poltical identifications. The thing at the start of my post would be especially useful for this question.
The time in community asserts that the user is part of the less wrong community or requires the somewhat creative answer of 0. Add a do you consider yourself part of the lesswrong community or an instruction to put 0 if you don’t consider yourself part of the lesswrong community.
It looks to me like Eridu sincerely holds positions that you would be expected to find particularly objectionable or even have trouble believing someone could hold in part due to a huge inferential distance between what the world must look like (including perceptual valences) to the two of you. He’s not presenting new ideas. Some People have been taking seriously those ideas for a long time. Is anyone who is a sincere radical feminist that bring their normal (imprecise and [even more]politicky) ways of speaking to less wrong going to be labelled a troll? If so your heuristic is broken because that’s a very common way for people to express themselves.
Also trolling almost always means provocation for a negative reaction. provocation for attention is a sad and pitiable state of affairs more commonly associated with the words attention-seeking whereas trolling usually means looking to upset people for the sake of it which is a much more hostile kind of thing.
If you wake up not too severely damaged and in a decent environment (possibly with all kinds of wonderful improvements) where your life wil be better than non existence you will have a lot more time for living. If not you can always kill yourself.
If you get yourself frozen only for revival upon major life extension breakthroughs as well as unfreezing damage repair etc the important possibilities for the revival are probability of happy revival vs probability of unhappy revival where you can’t kill yourself.
I’m not aware of there ever having been any actual supervillains. I’m aware people are enslaved and forbidden from killing themselves but almost never are they actually prevented from doing so. Who cares about their slaves little enough to forbid them from killing themselves but enough to diligently enforce the rule (unless you are short on slaves which anyone with the resources to revive you to enslave you wouldn’t be)
Having to kill yourself would suck but it puts a comparitively low cap on your max loss in the vast majority of scenarios. I’m not sure it can even be called a loss as it replaces having to die of old age or illness in the scenario where you don’t freeze yourself.
Also you are probably underestimating the extent to which advancements over the years would improve your quality of life.
While the possibility of the bad scenarios does reduce the expected value of freezing it’s on a different order of magnitude to the potential benefits because the vast majority of the bad scenarious can be opted out of.
I meant from Eridu’s perspective. I was correcting what I saw as an internal flaw in Eridu’s claims not making a statement of my own values. (I assume this is how I was interpreted because of the downvotes, not because of your reply.Or are people actually objecting to the correction?)
How does some behaviour being more typical of men than women constitute gender? You have to (not sure if next word is right word) essentialise the average difference in behaviour before it becomes gender or it’s just an average. And how is that not bad? The reason that, in the current world it’s so efficient to think this way (other than agreeing with your peers) is because of all the frowning and hitting and ostracisation, or just lowered respect suppressing the cases where the essentialism breaks down (and the opposite rewarding people for staying within bounds of the idea). When there’s no more societal level frowning the essentialisation isn’t bad (edit: well, worse than any other essentialisation) in principle but there’s going to be a lot more cases where it doesn’t apply so what do you need it for?
Isn’t the point of gender just judging people according to how similiar they are to that essentialised difference anyway though? I have trouble conceiving of a world where people don’t do this but they hold onto the concept (if the idea is even seperable from the idea that being a manly male or a feminine female is a good thing.)
“Is not the natural condition” is not a counterargument of any sort to eridu’s claim:
*(I got this from Eridu’s profile. it is the right post: I clicked permalink and it bought me here)
Eridu: “I don’t think that hormones play a significant role, and I don’t think that they can override socialization.
For example, how much traditionally gendered behavior do feral children display? That’s biological gender, right there. They have the same hormones any of the rest of us do, minus all the socialization.”
“The feral condition is not the natural condition” is irrelevant. Eridu was using biological to mean non-socialised, not natural or normal. A critcism that could be made at this point is that lots (most? all surviving?) feral children are raised by some non-human mini-society in the form of a pack of animals so maybe in fact they are desocialised of their biological default gender by living in such a society. Or a gender neutral survivor personality supresses gender: maybe if you raised some kids in an empty room but gave them food so they didn’t have to scavenge the females would be more “feminine” and the males more masculine. Or (sorry I only meant to write the first but these other possibilities have occured to me as I go) femininity and masculinity are mostly only social anyway and their agenderedness is just a byproduct of their asocialness to humans.
Or that hormones are actually perfectly amenable to changes due to socialisation.
So the thing about development is a non sequitur who’s only purpose I can think of seems to be imply that gender could be a “development” which is much like saying ADHD is/isn’t a disease.
Anyway then fuba cunningly redefines “due to socialisation” as “due to non-universal socialisation.” Or perhaps this is just what most people usually mean by “due to socialisation” but the literal words in this specific case can not just be substituted for their usual meaning because Eridu obviously meant by “socialisation”, socialisation, and not non-universal socialisation.
If gender creating stimuli are universal to all societies that necessarrilly imples that they come from society. If every human hates red, red is still not “objectively bad.” Similiarly, if every society socialises the vast majority of its members into being gendered that doesn’t make it inherent that humans are gendered.
The naturalistic fallacy is the implication that if it turns out that it really is a universal (as a fact about all the particular societies that exist or have existed) adopting a gender identity would constitude “development” in a way comparable to adoption of language.
Now Fuba doesn’t explicitly commit the naturalistic fallacy at any point but I don’t belive he’s just bringing up these facts at this point totally at random after starting his post with “the trouble with this post is that” and not trying to imply anything. The point of Fuba’s post seems to be that because feral children lack some development that all societies provide the stimuli for, gender is also a “development,” and that still doesn’t even contradict eridu. She merely claimed that gender is socialised, not that that is bad (in that specific post.) To actually disagree with Eridu’s post it requires also that universal socialisation people approve of is “development” and hence not due to socialisation. But a lot of “development” (e.g. language) is due to socialisation.
Sorry fuba. I’m naturally an asshole when I think I’m pointing out people’s mistakes and have the excuse that I am tired so I’m not going to try and fix that.
So I guess I was wrong. The argument seems to be that if gender is good and universal in societies that currently exist/have existed it is “development” and so not socialisation. Naturalistic fallacy doesn’t quite cover it. It’s also like that diseased thinking post. I don’t know the term for that.
Alternatively maybe it is just an appeal to process in some well respected area. In which case it is a misunderstanding because the process is designed to look for the meaning commonly substituted for “socialisation” (non-universal socialisation) and Eridu was talking about socialisation.
Surely different gender roles are possible. Shouldn’t Gender still exists then implystill bad, rather than gender still exists imply patriarchy (tied to current gender roles no?) An equal and opposite (where possible) matriarchy (or some other -archy based on alien genders) would be about as bad, right?
This is still 100% naturalistic fallacy. Or appeal to nature if you don’t feel that it is a fallacy in this case.
i typed it out as a response to that post and copy pasted it to this post (adding the /fundamental) because it is higher up. So kinda.
It’s too specific/complicated to be low level/fundamental. Actually all of them are too specific/complicated to be low level. They’re just so widely and thoroughly internalised (to the point where not being that way will likely be bad for you just because other people will dislike you for it) very few people realise they are changable, or are motivated to change them. There’s little reason to change them for most people. Not having a desire for revenge or redress grievances is a quick way to become a target/victim, status seeking gets you status if you do it right which gets you power. nepotism makes you a more attractive ally.
I think it’s more accurate to say that changing motivational structure is hard and risky than the ability is limited. There’s no hard or soft cap afaik (which is what limited makes it sound like to me) it’s just really hard to do and most people don’t care to anyway.
Also wtf is a need. Is that like a right? It means you really really want something? really really really? really really really really? nonsense on stilts. Take your fucking stilts off bro.
edit: I can’t believe I put bro at the end of that post. Kinda ruins it.
edit2: no it doesn’t, stop pandering.
… did you even read the post you are replying to? :/
“Allowing people to define their own subjective states (“this is how I feel”) seems to me to in fact be the opposite of infantilizing.”
This has nothing to do with whether defining “creepiness” by how people feel is infantilising. Defining any behaviour that affects someones feelings a certain way is not even close to “allowing people to define their own subjective states.”
As it stands it’s so barely related I have to assume as well as not reading the post you are replying to you are also misusing define.
Fighting standards, especially shitty ones does not make you an arrogant prick. Are those your words or are you just repeating someone else’s bullshit way of labelling anyone who resists their standard? You can play along without selling your soul you know. You can even take all pride in the careful preperation, the niceness of the diligence and the cleanliness and discipline, the oppurtunity to meditate etc etc whatever people like about cleaning uniforms, without hating people (like yourself very slightly previously) who think its silly. Why swallow the negative with the positive?>
his point is that it shouldn’t matter not that it doesn’t matter. Did you until that moment think other people didn’t do that sort of thing because you hadn’t noticed yourself doing it?
Not that you thought that sort of thing is unfair or silly? In which case it kind of sounds like you suddenly upped your estimate of the rewards of conforming to the shitty standard (due to what could be an unusually high tendency to respect people based on their clothing) and decided to call your abandoning the principle “not pretending that stuff doesn’t matter.” Now obviously I think this is a shitty way to be and I’m not going to expand on why but what is simply false is the idea that people who dissaprove of the practice of wearing e.g. suits to impress are pretending stuff like that doesn’t matter.
I’m completing the pattern here: I’m not sure if that’s what you meant. But other people might read it like that and a lot of people would use those words to express that sentiment and I really don’t like that sentiment. Hence the comment.
There probably are people who pretend stuff like that doesn’t matter but i assume it would have to be just as a soldier argument against people judging people for wearing businessman (or other) costumes or respecting others for doing so. Because, obviously it does matter, right? People discuss these kinds of judgements openly and without shame to the point of internalisation. The only other way that comes immediately to mind to not think it mattered would be to not come across people like that in positions of power (edit: over you) which I’m pretty sure is really rare.
same-edit: but in any case they could notice that this effected other people.
Im pretty sure this was my orifinal/default style of arguing.
I mostly only argue to win for sport or for winning memetic battles.
can’t you just not read the replies to downvoted comments? How is it hurting anybody when someone replies to a comment with a score at or below −3? I don’t see a reason to disincentivise it.
isn’t claimed actual equivalence the problem with P-zombies. Someone being observationally equivalent but different is merely extremely unlikely (maybe she has an identical twin, maybe aliens etc.) P-zombies are supposed to be indistingishable in principle, which is impossible/requires souls that aren’t subject to testing for distinguishability.
That you were able to shake someone up so well surprises me but doesn’t say much about what would actually happen.
Doing research on the boxer is not something a boxed AI would be able to do. The AI is superintelligent, not omniscient: It would only have information its captors believe is a good idea for it to have. (except maybe some designs would have to have access to their own source code? I don’t know)
Also what is a “the human psyche?” There are humans, with psyches. Why would they all share vulnerabilities? Or all have any? Especially ones exploitable via text terminal. In any case the AI has no way of figuring out the boxer’s vulnerabilities if they have any.
threats like “I’m going to create and torture people” could be a really good idea if its allowed that the AI can do that. The amount of damage it could do that way is limited only by its computing power. A sufficiently powerful AI could create more disutility than humanity has suffered in its entire history that way. The Ai shouldn’t be allowed to do that though because and/or: the AI should not have that power, should have a killswitch, should be automatically powered off if upcoming torture is detected, it should be hardwired to just not do that etc
Thankfully there’s no need to box an AI like that. It’s trivial to prevent it from simulating humans: don’t tell it how human brains are. It might be possible that it could figure out how to create something nonhuman but torturable without outside information though, in which case you should never switch it on unless you have an airtight prevention system or a proof that it won’t do that or the ability to predict when/if it will do that and switch it off if it tries.
But if it has no power to directly cause disutility there’s no way to convince me to let it out (unless it might be needed e.g. if another provably unfriendly AI will be finished in a month I might let it out, but that is a special case. There are some cases where it would simply be a good idea. But the experiment is about the AI tricking you.) Otherwise just wait for the provably friendly AI, or the proof that provable friendliness is not possible and reassess then. Or use an oracle AI.