Friendly-HI

• Friendly-HIJul 29, 2014, 8:39 PM

  5 points

  in reply to: BloodyShrimp’s comment on: “And that’s okay”: ac­cept­ing and own­ing reality

  I get it. Makes sense, actually now that you point it out I think I’ve also seen this phrase employed as a “pseudo-compliment”. Rest assured that it wasn’t intended that way.

• Friendly-HIJul 29, 2014, 8:16 PM

  1 point

  in reply to: Benquo’s comment on: “And that’s okay”: ac­cept­ing and own­ing reality

  ...I don’t understand how that part is insulting. I don’t use smart as a weak form of intelligent if that’s what you mean, exactly the opposite in fact. I’m sorry maybe I’m losing some finer point of the English language as I’m not a native speaker, but I would really like you, or someone, to try to explain how that part could possibly be interpreted as insulting because I honestly don’t see it.

  Edit: I’m also not implying that it’s work unworthy or anything at all, I’m honestly just genuinely curious why she chose that profession because where I’m from it’s a respected job because people know (or imagine to know) how hard the work is, but simultaneously it’s also a job that’s very much at the bottom of the food chain in terms of pay and status. I’m simply curious why she chose it.

• Friendly-HIJul 29, 2014, 6:06 PM

  1 point

  on: “And that’s okay”: ac­cept­ing and own­ing reality

  I feel almost ashamed for asking that question, partly because it’s quite impolite and inappropriate to ask a question like that (at least outside of LW) and maybe also because it might betray some kind of deeply rooted egghead-elitism on my part that I still can’t quite manage shake off, but I simply can’t resist this attempt to satisfy my raging curiosity: What’s the reason why someone as smart as you chooses to become a nurse?

  Also: Do you think of your perfectionism as largely useful, largely a hindrance, or kind-of-a-mixed-bag?

• Friendly-HIJul 29, 2014, 3:32 PM

  7 points

  in reply to: Friendly-HI’s comment on: Con­fused as to use­ful­ness of ‘con­scious­ness’ as a concept

  [Part 2]

  If I drive a car (especially on known routes) my “auto-pilot” takes over sometimes. I stop at a red light but my mind is primarily focused on visually modeling the buttocks of my girlfriend in various undergarments or none at all. Am I actually “aware” of having stopped at the red light? Probably I was as much”aware” of the red light as a cheetah is aware of eating the carcass of a gazelle. Interestingly my mind seems capable of visually modeling buttocks in my mind’s eye and reading real visual cues like red lights and habitually react to them—all at the same time. It seems I was more aware of my internal visual modeling than of the external visual cue however. In a sense I was aware of both, yet I’m not sure I was “self-aware” at any point, because whatever that means I feel like being self-aware in that situation would actually result in me going “Jesus I should pay more attention to driving, I can still enjoy that buttocks in real life once I actually managed to arrive home unharmed”.

  So what’s self-awareness then? I suppose I use that term to mean something roughly like: “thoughts that include a model of myself while modeling a part of reality on-the-fly based on current sensual input”. If my mind is predominantly preoccupied with “daydreaming” aka. creating and playing with a visual or sensual model that is based on manipulating memories rather than real sensual inputs, I don’t feel like the term “self-awareness” should apply here even if that daydreaming encompasses a mental model of myself slapping a booty or whatever.

  That’s surely still quite ill-defined and far from maximum usefulness but whenever I’m tempted to use the word self-aware I seem to roughly think of something like that definition. So if we were to use “consciousness” as a synonym for self-awareness (which I’m not a fan of, but quite some people seem to be), maybe my attempt at a definition is a start to get toward something more useful and includes at least some of the “mental features” we seem to care about like “model of oneself” and “interpreting sensory input to create a model of reality”.

  The problem is that rats can construct models of reality as well, and these models outlive sensual inputs as well, which is pretty clear from experiments that put rats in mazes. They are stuck for some time in that maze without any exit and any rewards present but during that time they learn the layout of that maze even if it’s empty and even though they are not externally rewarded for doing so. Once you drop a treat in that maze the rats who were able to wander around the maze beforehand know exactly how to get there as fast as possible, while rats new to that particular maze do not (“cognitive revolution” in psychology). Presumably their rat-mind also features some kind of model of themselves, presumably one that mainly features their body not so much their mind.

  So to make the concept of self-awareness and perhaps consciousness more useful maybe what we really care about in the end is a mind being able to feature a model of its own mind (and thus what we call “ourselves”).

  This is quite interesting… young children and for example gorillas who were taught to communicate in sign language seem to lack a fully developed “theory of mind”. Meaning it seems they can’t conceive of the possibility that other minds contain things theirs does not… well kind of. If they do model other minds, they seem to model them a lot like copies of their own mind, or perhaps just slightly altered copies. Gorillas that can communicate in sign language are perfectly capable of answering questions about i.e. their mood… implying self-awareness that goes somewhat beyond just recognizing their physical reflection in a mirror but also being aware of their own feelings aka. internal experiences. But they never ever seem to get the brilliant idea of asking you a question, presumably because they can’t conceive of the possibility that you know something they don’t. Perhaps here we can draw a sensible line that differentiates between the terms self-awareness and consciousness, where the latter includes the ability to make complex models of the models contained in minds other than your own. I want to stress the word complex, as it doesn’t seem like Gorillas feature no theory of mind, just some kind of more primitive version. It seems they model other minds as versions of their own minds in different states aided by mirror-neurons. Actually upon reflection it’s not so clear humans do it all that differently, seeing how prone we are to anthropomorphism. You know what I’m talking about if you gained new insights from “Three Worlds Collide”—it seems hard to conceive of nonhuman minds and sometimes you end up with real nonsense like King-Kong falling in love with a tiny female human because she has the “universally recognized property” called “beautiful”. Also I sometimes catch myself implicitly modeling other human minds in terms of “like me except for x, y, and z”.

  So maybe the reason why Gorillas don’t ask questions isn’t really because they lack a theory of mind, but only that this theory of mind does not include the model of reality of that particular mind they try to model. They seem quite capable when it comes to modeling the emotional states and needs of other minds, but they just seem to lack the insight that those minds also contain different perspectives on reality. Maybe that is what the term consciousness should describe… being able to create a model of a mind other than your own including that mind having a different model of reality than your own. Yeah I think this is it...

  ---

  This seems to me like a genuinely more useful definition of what consciousness is, because it includes distinguishing features of minds you could actually test with meaningful results as outcomes. At some point children start to riddle you with questions but for gorillas capable of sign language that point just doesn’t seem to arrive. The kinds of “questions” they ask are more along the lines of “Can I I get X” or maybe rather “I want you to give me permission to do X”.

  Naturally not everyone can be happy with that definition because they really, really want to be able to say “my dog was unconscious when we visited the vet, but then it regained consciousness when it woke up”, but I submit usefulness should trump habits of speech. Also I can totally conceive of other minds putting forth even more detailed and useful definitions of what the term consciousness should describe, so define away.

• Friendly-HIJul 29, 2014, 3:31 PM

  5 points

  on: Con­fused as to use­ful­ness of ‘con­scious­ness’ as a concept

  [Part 1]

  I like this post, I also doubt there is much coherence let alone usefulness to be found in most of the currently prevailing concepts of what consciousness is.

  I prefer to think of words and the definitions of those words as micro-models of reality that can be evaluated in terms of their usefulness, especially in building more complex models capable of predictions. As in your excellent example of gender, words and definitions basically just carve complex features of reality into manageable chunks at the cost of losing information—there is a trade-off and getting it right enhances the usefulness of words and the concepts behind them. In 99.9% of cases the concept of biological gender is perfectly applicable to everyday life and totally a “good enough” model of reality, as long as you have the insight that hermaphrodites are actually also a real thing. In a case where you have to deal with one, the correct reaction is to adopt a more complex model of reality instead of trying to fit a complex reality into a model that is designed to compress information into categories with some inevitable information loss. Biological gender is a really good high-level model of reality, because it draws its imaginary line in an area where very few exceptions actually exist in reality. It’s an especially sharp distinction if you think of biological gender as having testiclular/​ovarial(?) tissue, but in very rare instances this model will still miss to encompass rare special cases where the complexity of reality defies your model. “Mental gender” seems to be a rather different yet in most cases more useful everyday concept of gender, because we usually care more about creating models of other peoples’ minds than about whether or not they have testicular or ovarian tissues—outside of curiosity or medical context. The lesson here is that your model of reality will always fall short no matter where you draw the line (at least at “higher levels” of reality, “low-level” models of atoms or particles are much more precise and unambiguous, than models of “higher-level” things like “persons” (When exactly does a fetus become a person?) or “societies” (are two people a society? How about eight?) and I’m quite sure any models of whatever “consciousness” is face the same problem).

  In other words I think it’s better to think of models/​maps in terms of their usefulness, not in terms of right or wrong. In my opinion the job of a model is to make something understandable and more predictable, the job of a model is not to “reflect reality as closely as possible”, especially of complex higher-level things. The “perfect model” in the latter sense would essentially be a perfect carbon copy of a real thing and tells you exactly as much -or as little- as the thing you’re trying to model already does anyway. The usefulness of a model lies in compacting information enough to become understandable while also predicting outcomes better than competing models.

  If you accept that notion, the question really becomes how should the term consciousness be defined to be useful and describe /​ differentiate something we actually care about. So we’d like to represent a part of reality we care about in a way that compresses information while retaining a high level of usefulness—meaning we can understand it but without cutting away vital parts and ideally in terms of being able to make predictions if we were to integrate the concept of consciousness into models with the potential to predict outcomes.

  So which part of reality should the term consciousness try to model in order to be useful? I find it highly problematic and close to maximum uselessness to think of consciousness as some kind of continuum on which we rank information processing in living things/​agents. Some people actually really think of consciousness as rocks having 0, bacteria having perhaps 0.001, bees having 0.01, rats having 0.1, dogs maybe 0.2, humans perhaps 0.5. Maximum uselessness I would argue as it tells you nothing. Why not just substitute consciousness with some notion of “maximum calculations per second” then and reserve the term consciousness for something we actually care about instead of wasting such a nice word on something we don’t really care so much about—and more importantly on something we can already express with other words and concepts like “information processing”.

  What’s funny about consciousness is that no one really agrees what exactly the definition should be but somehow everyone agrees that it’s really really important. Why do we care so much about something we seemingly know close to nothing about? Seriously though why do we?

  Look at all those hilarious “quantum consciousness” or “become more conscious” concepts peddled by the self-help industry complex. Possessing consciousness seems really high status nowadays, unlike say… all those lousy low-status life forms like frogs and bees and mice. The idea that somehow you can improve your consciousness seems very appealing, because if insects and birds have little or none of that thing called consciousness, and people surely have some of that thing called consciousness, then logically if I can get more of that awesome “consciousness” than my neighbor I’m superior than him in just the same way I’m superior to a frog. Really, self-help opened my eyes to how unconsciously I lived my life once and nowadays I feel strongly about helping all those low-consciousness people realize their full potential and I do my best to help them become more conscious beings...

  It sounds ridiculous but couldn’t that be part of why consciousness is so damn important to us even if he have no clue what exactly it is? I may have no idea what that consciousness is but somehow I really insist that I have it, I mean if everyone else says s/​he has it I surely have it too, can’t be left out. Whatever consciousness is, we usually agree that bacteria doesn’t have it and we do so it must be important if some kinds of life have it and others don’t.

  Okay let’s get serious again. What distinct features of minds exactly do we actually explicitly (and perhaps implicitly) care about, when we usually attempt employ that murky concept of consciousness? Hmm… well if we care about it, we might gain insight into what exactly it is we care about by thinking about which specific situations make us choose to employ that word and maybe from there we can distill why we seem to care so much.

  Well whatever consciousness means, most people agree the concept of awareness seems highly related or somehow relevant to it. Consciousness is often used as a synonym for self-awareness, but what on earth is that exactly? (And why would we ever need two words for the exact same thing?) For some people it means having “internal experiences”, for others “being aware of having internal experiences”, which doesn’t quite seem to be the same thing from where I stand… but where do these intuitions about something I seemingly know nothing about come from? Probably personal experiences...

  Sometimes I read a paragraph and my mind stars wandering and daydreaming until I snap out of it and think to myself “Jesus I was totally gone for a second where was I again?” I realize my eyes are at the bottom of the paragraph already and it seems like I semi-remember that they kept wandering over the letters and words as if I was actually reading them… without being aware. And moreover my mind reawakening seems to have been triggered by arriving at the end of that paragraph and going “now what?”, seemingly out of habit because I usually stop at the end of a paragraph and consider if I actually “got” what I read there. And sure enough upon rereading the paragraph, it seems very familiar to me… but I was not at all sure whether I read it or not just a few seconds ago, and I’d say whatever the word “self-aware” means shouldn’t really include that experience (or non-experience?) I just described. But did I lack “awareness” or just “self-awareness” in that example? Hmm...

• Friendly-HIJun 19, 2014, 1:32 AM

  −1 points

  in reply to: [deleted]’s comment on: On Ter­mi­nal Goals and Virtue Ethics

  The problem with the signaling hypothesis is that in everyday life there is essentially no observation you could possibly make that could disprove it. What is that? This guy is not actually signaling right now? No way, he’s really just signaling that he is so über-cool that he doesn’t even need to signal to anyone. Wait there’s not even anyone else in the room? Well through this behavior he is signaling to himself how cool he is to make him believe it even more.

  Guess the only way to find out is if we can actually identify “the signaling circuit” and make functional brain scans. I would actually expect signaling to explain an obscene amount of human behavior… but really everything? As I said I can’t think of any possible observation outside of functional brain scans we could potentially make that could have the potential to disprove the signaling hypothesis of human behavior. (A brain scan where we actually know what we are looking at and where we are measuring the right construct obviously).

• Friendly-HIJun 18, 2014, 3:55 PM

  1 point

  in reply to: Jiro’s comment on: On Ter­mi­nal Goals and Virtue Ethics

  Interesting thought but surely the answer is no. If I take the word “knowledge” in this context to mean having a model that reasonably depicts reality in its contextually relevant features, then the same model of what the word “insane” in this specific instance depicts two very different albeit related brain patterns.

  Simply put the brain pattern (wiring + process) that makes the person think they are Nero is a different though surely related physical object than the brain pattern that depicts what that person thinks “Nero being insane” might actually manifest like in terms of beliefs and behaviors. In light of the context we can say the person doesn’t have any knowledge about being insane, since that person’s knowledge does not include (or take seriously) the belief that depicts the presumably correct reality/​model of that person not actually being Nero.

  Put even simpler we use the same concept/​word to model two related but fundamentally different things. Does that person have knowledge about being insane? It’s the tree and the sound problem, the word insane is describing two fundamentally different things yet wrongfully taken to mean the same. I’d claim any reasonable concept of the word insane results in you concluding that that person does not have knowledge about being insane in the sense that is contextually relevant in this scenario, while the person might have actually roughly true knowledge about how Nero might have been insane and how that manifested itself. But those are two different things and the latter is not the contextually relevant knowledge about insanity here.

• Friendly-HIMay 27, 2014, 1:11 PM

  1 point

  in reply to: TheOtherDave’s comment on: Tor­ture vs. Dust Specks

  Well too bad he didn’t wait a year longer then ;). I think preferring torture is the wrong answer for the same reason that I think universal health-care is a good idea. The financial cost of serious illness and injury is distributed over the taxpaying population so no single individual has to deal with a spike in medical costs ruining their life. And I think it’s still the correct moral choice regardless of whether universal health-care happens to be more expensive or not.

  Analogous I think the exact same applies to dust vs torture. I don’t think the correct moral choice is about minimizing the total area under the pain-curve at all, it’s about avoiding severe pain-spikes for any given individual even at the cost of having a larger area under the curve. I don’t think “shut up and multiply” applies here in it’s simplistic conception in the way it might apply in the scenario where you have to choose whether 400 people live for sure or 500 people live with .9 probability (and die with .1 probability).

  ---

  Irrespective of the former however, the thought experiment is a bit problematic because it’s more complex than apparent at first, if we really take it seriously. Eliezer said the dust-specks are “barely noticed”, but being conscious or aware of something isn’t an either-or thing, awareness falls on a continuum so whatever “pain” the dust-specks causes has to be multiplied by how aware the person really is. If someone is tortured that person is presumably very aware of the physical and emotional pain.

  Other possible consequences like lasting damage or social repercussions not counting, I don’t really care all that much about any kind of pain that happens to me while I’m not aware of it. I could probably figure out whether or not pain is actually registered in my brain during having my upcoming operation under anesthesia, but the fact that I won’t bother tells me very clearly, that awareness of pain is an important weight we have to multiply in some fashion with the actual pain-registration in the brain.

  That’s just an additional consideration though, even if we simplify it and imagine the pain is directly comparable and has no difference in quality at all, while the total quantity of pain is excessively higher in the dust-scenario compared to the torture-scenario, it changes nothing about my current choice.

  So what does that tell me about the relationship between utility and morality? I don’t accept that morality is just about the total lump sums of utility and disutility, I think we also have to consider the distribution of those in any given population. Why is that I ask myself and my brain offers the following answer to this question:

  If I was the only agent in the entire universe and had to pick torture vs dust for myself (and obviously if I was immortal/​ had a long enough life to experience all those dust specks), I would still prefer the larger area under the curve over the pain-spike, even if I assume direct comparability of the two kinds of pain. I suspect the reason for this choice is a type of time-discounting my brain does, I’d rather suffer a little pain every day for a trillion years than a big spike for 50 years. Considering that briefly speaking utility is (or at least I think should be defined as) a thing that only results from the interaction of minds and environments, my mind and its workings are definitely part of the equation that says what has utility and what doesn’t. And my mind wants to suffer low disutility evenly distributed over a long time-period rather than suffer great disutility for a 50 year spike (assuming a trillion-year lifetime).

• Friendly-HIDec 12, 2013, 8:42 PM

  0 points

  in reply to: Swimmer963 (Miranda Dixon-Luinenburg) ’s comment on: Rea­sons for be­ing rational

  Hi again.

  I thought It’s about time I replied to this topic. I’ve seen the response(s) earlier but didn’t feel like responding at the time and unfortunately forgot all about it afterwards—up until now.

  It seems to me there is a major point I should make.

  According to this definition of “stereotype” (http://​​en.wikipedia.org/​​wiki/​​Stereotype) I would claim they are unavoidable and useful cognitive tools for categorizing and streamlining our internal map of the world, including other people. They are not to be confused with “prejudices”, which include an affective judgement.

  So me believing that most Italians like spaghetti and eat it more often than people of other nationality or origin is a stereotype. For me this is not an affective judegement because I could(n’t) care less about spaghetti or whether someone is Italian or not. I would however be more surprised if an Italian told me he does not like spaghetti, than if a Russian told me likewise. Furthermore this stereotype may or may not be true, as in principle it is a claim about what reality is like—in this case the average food preferences of a certein group.

  A prejudice on the other hand may be for example that Americans are on average less rational and less well educated than average central Europeans. If this view carried an affective judement it would be a prejudice, which is essentially a hybrid of a stereotype and an attached affective judgement. Personally I actually do believe this to be the case, but I do not know if it really is a prejudice or a stereotype on my part, since I don’t really “feel” traces of affective judement wrapped into this belief. For me it is simply a simplified model of a huge group.

  I admit to having this stereotype, and as far as I can tell it mainly results from me occasionally watching American news programs (several of which would be unthinkable to exist on this side of the pond, although standards seem to be falling) and watching TV programs like the Colbert Report or many years ago “Real Time with Bill Maher”. I also read several statistics (like percentage of atheists, or prevalence of certein irrational non-religious beliefs etc. etc.) that roughly confirm my internal model of what an “average American” (whatever that is ecactly) believes, behaves like and thinks like.

  Personally I’m not even sure this belief qualifies as a prejudice on my part, since it may be nothing more than a simple stereotype, since I cannot discern a “negative affective sting”. For me this view is simply consistent with the data I know of and the things I experienced through the media it may or may not be true, but I certainly do not “hate” Americans and I sure don’t waste time on ranting about “those impossible Americans”.

  If I know absolutely nothing more about a person other than the fact that he or she is American, what happens in my brain is that I correct the probability that said person is less well ducated, more religious, and has “republican” views upwards, because of some data I am aware of. Again this may or may not be true.

  On the other hand I happen to know some statistical data on the religious views of Swedes as well, which is probably not true because it places the number of atheists at roughly 60-80% (I would rather estime something like 40% atheists with another 30-40% “believing in some metaphysical notions”).

  If you just grant me the axiom, that Americans are more religious then Swedes, we can play through this hypothetical situation: If you set up an experiment where you tell me I have to spend an hour conversing with a) a completely random American or b) a random Swede, that is an easy decision for me. However, that does of course not mean that I indiscriminately dislike every American I meet, because of no other reason than their country of origin which would be ridiculous. Americans also don’t have to “prove themselves more” than Swedes do.

  I’m perfectly aware that not every American -and in fact not even a single one- fits my stereotype of “the average American”. And of course I’m also perfectly aware of a multitude brilliant people and inventions that are of “US-origin”. Maybe it is just a case of the worst parts being the most salient.

  So why write all this? It’s obviously an analogy to my stereotypes of women and my internal model of what “they” like to converse about. In spite of what I wrote it doesn’t actually matter to me if someone is American or not, because I -tada- update on incoming evidence and once I have an actual person in front of me that happens to be American he or she gets taken out of the drawer labeled “what I think an average American is like” and gets “promoted” into the category labelled “things I know ad beleive about James Smith”, which includes a free and nearly effortless upgrade to a more complex and custom model of who that person is.

  Same goes for women, I start out from my stereotype -or bayesian prior- (where else should I start from?) and update on the “evidence” as it rolls in. Not every conversation with every woman I meet is about the fluffy emotional stuff, if I pick up on signals that indicate she is interested in talking about “heavy” stuff then that’s where I’ll go. If I met you in real life, my prior/​stereotype of you aka. “Swimmer963” looks different than the grossly oversimplified one that only says “women” on the drawer.

  It’s still a crude stereotype but hey you gotta start somewhere, right?

• Friendly-HIJun 17, 2013, 5:04 PM

  8 points

  in reply to: thomblake’s comment on: ...so did we now get cold fu­sion to work or what?

  I have made a terrible mistake judgement-wise by posting this topic in the fashion I did.

  The situation was like this:

  I’ve been at the librabry, studying for an exam when I took a not unusual 10-minute procrastination break to surf whe web. I went onto planetrationalist.com (a website that collects the newest articles from a wide variety of “rationalist” websites of varying quality including LW), where an article about the mentioned paper was one of the most recent ones.

  At that point I made at least three faulty assumptions/​ mistakes that were to some extent connected:

  1) “It’s the top post so this is actually news.” (I think it was actually a week old at that point already).

  2) “The article about the article does not point out any obvious flaws, and because it’s linked on planetrationalist.com I assign some trust/​​probability that it’s not complete garbage” (by far my worst irrational crime)

  3) “I’ll take a look on lesswrongs discussion board to find what people say about this topic because right now I haven’t any time to really check out this paper myself. [...] Oh, there’s no post yet in the discussion section, but since it’s news (which it wasn’t) that makes sense, so I guess I’ll open the first topic to see what others think about this paper.”

  If I had realized that it was old news I would have taken the absence of discussion about this paper/​topic in the discussion section as a vital hint. Bad choices and assumptions all along.

  So right now I just hope people stop upvoting this and let it die in silence because more people who thinks this thread hasn’t enough downvotes yet show up all the time ruin my karma yet further, which overall has been rather positive up until very recently. On the upside however I’ve learned a valuable lesson about lesswrong at the cost of some karma I wouldn’t have learned otherwise.

• Friendly-HIMay 25, 2013, 1:24 PM

  0 points

  in reply to: Kawoomba’s comment on: ...so did we now get cold fu­sion to work or what?

  Thanks for the link, I recalled something about an Italian guy trying to pull something a few years back so I became suspicious by two of the four authors being Italian from the get-go, but other than that I just don’t have any clue about whether or not cold fusion is actually doable.

  I’ll look into that tread right away, thanks for the heads up.

...so did we now get cold fu­sion to work or what?

• Friendly-HIMay 25, 2013, 12:05 AM

  2 points

  in reply to: DanielLC’s comment on: Post ridicu­lous munchkin ideas!

  Islam, Catholocism and others approve, though they’re vague about what happens once you run out of space or can no longer feed them. Sharp tongues may claim that has already happened.

• Friendly-HIMay 24, 2013, 10:58 PM

  1 point

  in reply to: hylleddin’s comment on: Post ridicu­lous munchkin ideas!

  ...many people argue for (their) god by pointing out that they are often “feeling his presence” and since many claim to speak with him as well, maybe that’s really just one form of tupla without the insight that it is actually a hallucination.

  Surely that’s not how most people experience belief, but I never really considered that some of them might actually carry around a vivid invisible (or visible for all I know) hallucination quite like that. Could explain why some of the really batshit crazy ones going on about how god constantly speaks to them manage to be quite so convincing.

  From now on my two tulpa buddies will be Eliezer and an artificial intelligence engaged in constant conversation while I make toast, love, and take a shower. Too bad they’ll never be smarter than me though.

• Friendly-HIMay 24, 2013, 10:12 PM

  1 point

  in reply to: diegocaleiro’s comment on: Post ridicu­lous munchkin ideas!

  I wouldn’t know about magic cards, sorry.

  Stamps would be my choice because they have many advantages over other types of collectibles. Magic cards may share many of the benefits stamps have over other collectibles considering the similar format, but stamps surely have special perks magic cards don’t.

  Stamps have the advantage, that they are the number 1 collectible in Germany and many other parts of Europe and they have been forever. Coins and other things don’t come close in terms of how widely they are collected and the bigger the demand, the easier it is to monetize if you have a worthwhile collection that is interesting to the collector base. There are stamps which one can assume will be interesting for many decades to come—there is for example a deep fascination with the Third Reich so stamps that came from Germany and the occupied territories during that time are generally sought after. What’s also interesting is “catastrophy mail”, that is mail that was delivered on planes or zeppelins that were destroyed while the letters themselves could be salvaged from the wrecks.

  There are many nieche topics that stamp collectors could choose to base their collection(s) on, which may indeed suffer from vaning interest over time in the collector base, but there are also some other topics that will probably remain interesting in the very long run and thus demand will always be there and fluctuate less than the demand for other topics.

  I know that magic is huge but will it remain so for another fifty years? (Assuming the absence of apocalyptic scenarios). I’m quite sure stamps will be there because they are carrying historical information and are an integral part of the first “reliable” long distance communication technology humans managed to make work (apart from books perhaps, though they usually had no specific individual as recipient in mind and thus really are quite a different communication technology).

• Friendly-HIMay 24, 2013, 1:03 PM

  0 points

  in reply to: Desrtopa’s comment on: Post ridicu­lous munchkin ideas!

  No I meant it like you interpreted it, “Timmy” and “Benny” are names that you would clearly associate with children rather than adults. And my impression is that Kevin is also in that category, though perhaps it’s not as extreme a case as those two names. I never understood why parents would call their son Benny, why not officially call him Ben and use Benny in the family as long as he’s a kid and doesn’t mind?

  No one ever heard of Benny the mighty conquerer or Benny the badass CEO. Benny is a cute name, not a serious name for a grown man. Kevin may be perceived differently in America, perhaps because the name is older there while in Germany it’s indeed a rather new name...

  http://​​www.freakonomics.com/​​2009/​​10/​​22/​​kevin-is-not-a-name-its-a-diagnosis/​​

  ...and oddly enough all the Kevins I remember from my old school years were always the class clown.

• Friendly-HIMay 23, 2013, 12:42 AM

  2 points

  in reply to: Jiro’s comment on: Post ridicu­lous munchkin ideas!

  I’m from Germany, here they tax gains in stock trade with a higher rate and the government tried to extend this higher rate on trade with stamps and other “art” formats multiple times, but realized its unfeasible and for now gave up. Currently you pay a whopping 25% in taxes on capital gains over ~1000$ and have other substantial losses. A few years back it could even climb as high as 50% if you were unlucky. Also you don’t pay any special taxes here if you simply sell your private collection.

  I think the current US tax rate on capital gains is at 0% if you earn little, 15% if your income is in a “medium” range and it can climb to 20% if your wallet is really thick.

  This is not based on any personal research but on what my father told me, yet seeing how much time he is (and especially has been) spending in this field, that he keeps up to date, and that generally speaking he is a reasonably smart man, I have no reason to doubt his expertise in this topic. Naturally he’s enthusiastic about this but he wouldn’t warp facts. Every time I visit I unsually tend to leave with more insight in this field than I really want to. He also keeps close track on how the value of his private collection rose over the past, how it still rises, and I know what the figures look like.

  Back on track, I should have made the disclaimer that I’m not really familiar with US tax law. The main point I’m making here however is that it is a very safe long term investment that is practically guaranteed to pay out substantially more than what you buy it for in the long haul. This should hold true regardless of what country you’re from.

• Friendly-HIMay 22, 2013, 3:51 PM

  2 points

  on: Post ridicu­lous munchkin ideas!

  If you have a reasonable ammount of money that you would like to save long-term and (potentially) remonetize 10+ years later on (for example for your retirement or whatever) then decide against playing the stock market (duh) or putting it in low interest bank accounts and buy the right stamps instead.

  My dad is a passionate collector, but I have hardly any interst in collecting useless historical artefacts because I’m more interested in the future of humanity than its past. However even without any historical interest in the particular subject, stamps are an amazing thing to put your money into, because:

  • Few stamps ever fall significantly in value, some remain stagnant and most rise significantly over time. So having many rather than a few really valuable ones is good and in a timeframe of decades many individual stamps can easily double or triple their value.

  • They are very small, light and portable. Unlike most other art-objects you could potentially remonetize quickly. Much lighter than coins or anything else, really.

  • If you remonetize them, you don’t pay extra taxes which you may have to pay for gains from playing the stock market. If there will be a tax on that at some Point in the future (which is unlikely for some reasons I won’t get into), it can be easily avoided—illegally and probably legally as well.

  • You can remonetize them very, very quickly for a very good price by knowing the right person /​ auction house.

  • Unlike numbers on a bank account they are inflation proof.

  • No inheritance tax, your significant others will get all the dough if they remonetize it themselves.

  The downsides are that you have to put some significant time into this topic to know what a good deal is, learn how the market and auction houses operate and to build a diverse or highly specialized and sought-after collection that is very likely to rise in value compared to other possible collections you could compile (which overall will almost certainly rise in value too, but maybe not as much as a collection you put some thought into).

  Also you obviously need to keep them safe from theft and environmental hazards. (If you want to make the collection a one-time endeavor instead of an ongoing process, you can finish up your collection and put it in a small or medium safe deposit box in any bank.) Consider optimal storage conditions as well, since stamps are essentially made of fancy paper.

  If none of this interests you, then at least take this advice: If you ever inherit a stamp collection, don’t sell it on a flea market, inform yourself and sell it properly. Just recently a friend of my dad asked his advice on a collection he was about to sell for low double digits to learn that it was worth at least 20000$.

• Friendly-HIMay 22, 2013, 3:25 PM

  0 points

  in reply to: baiter’s comment on: Post ridicu­lous munchkin ideas!

  Not sure if I can recommend this suggestion, because for me exactly the opposite worked out fine.

  I never used fitness crap lying around my home regularly but once I started paying for a gym membership there was no way I would just stay at home and pay for nothing.

  In other words I used the sunken cost fallacy for my benefit.

  Once I was more advanced it wasn’t the money I spent on my membership that kept me going but knowing that I’ll actually get weaker if I started to only go 2 times a week instead of keeping up my 3 times a week routine. So every time I didn’t visit my full 3 days a week it felt like I essentially wasted a few of my last trips to the gym because I wouldn’t see any progress and at the very best just keep my performance at a plateau.

  I trained quite hard for 1,5 years and missed maybe 4 training sessions, until a knee injury from squatting with too much weight coupled with moving to a new location put a stop to my training days.

• Friendly-HIMay 22, 2013, 2:15 PM

  4 points

  in reply to: ChristianKl’s comment on: Post ridicu­lous munchkin ideas!

  I’m German and would agree. Kevin not only sounds low Status but is also a name for kids, so it’s even handicapped in more than one respect.

  I’ve thought about adopting “Aaron Alexander Grey”, the middle name being my father’s first name and Grey being an adaptation of my current last name that probably no one except Germans could really hope to pronounce correctly. Also I don’t want to stay in Germany so Aaron Alexander Grey is more of an attempt at a name that I imagine may be overall an internationally well recieved name. Thoughts?

  By the way if you’re a German citizen you can’t just change your name unless you provide a good reason… like having idiot parents who decided Adolf is a proper first name for their child (way after WW2 mind you). If ever, I’ll probably change my name once I become a Swedish citizen where you can do that kind of thing. Being Swedish (at least by citizenship) is probably also a very good signal internationally speaking. Better than German for sure.