So far, we have information on Trump’s skill set as a businessman: immoral and unethical perhaps, but ultimately very successful.
He’s gone bankrupt six times.
Fyrius
Karma: 288
Of course, this plays in to the idea that people who oppose Trump are bullies who care more about optics than substance.
These sources are very partisan and biased.
Surely you ‘should’ only do something like this iff acquiring this amount of money has a higher utility to you than not ruining this lady’s day. Which, for most people, it doesn’t.
Since you’re saying ‘you are very rich’ and ‘some money which is a lot from her perspective’, you seem to be deliberately presenting gaining this money as very low utility, which you seem to assume should logically still outweigh what you seem to consider the zero utility of leaving the lady alone. But since I do actually give a duck about old ladies getting home safely (and, for that matter, about not feeling horribly guilty), mugging one has a pretty huge negative utility.
I wonder, does LW have active mods? Surely there must be rules against manipulating the karma system.
Because last night this post was still downvoted to heck, and now it’s suddenly at the top. That’s at least 15 upvotes in less than ten hours, in a largely deserted thread. On a quote where Trump brags about assaulting his teacher.
And the other four top comments are also unimpressive Trump quotes posted by cody-bryce, which had negative scores last night, and the comments calling them out – which had noticeably positive scores last night – are now all below the score threshold.
That doesn’t even make sense…
Yes, sometimes it’s best not to make an investment, obviously, trivially. But surely it makes no sense to include that decision in the category of ‘your investments’, good or bad.
“Why live alone on a mountain if you love conversation?”
″There are many hungers it is better to deny than to feed. Discipline against the lesser aids in denial of the greater.”-- Paarthurnax (Skyrim)
(I edited out the bits of gratuitous dragon language.)
That makes sense, I suppose.
That still sounds like ‘meta’ is a direction of (metaphorical) movement, but that it can be a different direction every time. Do you suppose you could have a situation where repeatedly ‘going meta’ would have you moving from one subject to the other and then back again, and again?
Yeah, that too.
Related thought: I think meta is a direction, rather than one specific level. What that would mean is that you can always go further meta; there’s reading the text, and then there’s considering the text within the academic landscape, then there’s examining the text together with its whole branch of science amidst all the sciences, then with science in general amidst human endeavours, etc.
Does that make sense?
I’m kind of done with this conversation.
One concluding footnote. It seems to offend you a lot that I called that one sentence ‘bad writing’. I want to point out that ‘bad writing’ has been the more generous explanation of the strangeness of that particular sentence. A slip of the pen is no big deal, it happens all the time.
It would be quite a bigger accusation if I insisted, like you, on taking that phrasing completely at face value, and then called the author a nutter for endorsing a model like that.(Of course, a still more generous interpretation would be that the word ‘anxiety’ is being used here in a specialised way with a very narrow definition, and that the apparent absurdity here is just a matter of lacking that context. Which you’re now hinting at by calling the rest ‘fear’—supposing that that’s a separate class of feelings—but still haven’t explicitly confirmed or denied.)
This seems true, if you’re talking about what I think you’re talking about.
I’ve had to teach myself a meta-textual awareness when reading academic stuff, in order to keep in mind why I’m reading this, compare the contents with what other authors say, connect with related concepts, see the implications, etc., while I’m reading. It certainly takes a lot more effort and presence of mind than just following the text.
I do of course lack the context, that’s true. Does the context define anxiety in such a narrow way that it makes more sense to trace it all back to being nice? (I imagine that’s what it would take for the context to justify that particular phrasing.)
I’m not particularly convinced that dentist anxiety would be any better in a world where yelling at your dentist for hurting you were considered socially acceptable, though. Anyway, even if those two examples can be explained away, better examples of anxiety that don’t seem to relate to niceness in any way aren’t difficult to think of at all. Some people become anxious from being inside an elevator or an airplane or just a very small room, or atop a tall building. Or being surrounded by sharks. Or on fire.
Surely in many cases, anxiety is a direct result of perceived danger, or of anticipating or being confronted with scary things.Angry outbursts can relieve anxiety, sure, but surely not every single instance of anxiety is caused by not letting oneself be angry.
Humans are not adapted for the task of scientific research. Humans are adapted to chase deer across the savanna, throw spears into them, cook them, and then—this is probably the part that takes most of the brains—cleverly argue that they deserve to receive a larger share of the meat.
It’s amazing that Albert Einstein managed to repurpose a brain like that for the task of doing physics.
Eliezer Yudkowsky, My Childhood Role Model
Not a very advanced idea, and most people here probably already realised it—I did too—but this essay uniquely managed to strike me with the full weight of just how massive the gap really is.
I used to think “human brains aren’t natively made for this stuff, so just take your biases into account and then you’re good to go”. I did not think “my god, we are so ridiculously underequipped for this.”
IMO synthetic biology constitutes a third domain of advancement—the future of the living world
Isn’t that a subset of the material world? I imagine nanotechnology is going to play a part in medicine and the like too, eventually.
Of course, more than one thing can be about the future of the somethingsomething world.
I love that ‘bullshit’ is now an academic term.
based on the idea that niceness is the cause of all anxiety.
All anxiety? Surely not. People get anxious about exams and going to the dentist and mortgages and impending wars and loads of other stuff that hasn’t got squat to do with this particular behaviour. That’s so obvious that nobody would make their model that absurdly broad.
I think what the author wanted to say was “based on the idea that there exists a psychological pattern that leads to anxiety and is caused by niceness.”
(Just nitpicking bad writing here, but it has to be said.)
Indeed. Like I mentioned briefly in my footnote, I understand that this is not an approach that you can apply that generally, in any situation. Particularly if you actually somehow depend on other people’s impressedness for something that matters to you, actively putting effort into impressing them (if done right) will probably get you more reliable results. If you really need people to think you’re amazing, I guess my approach would be a pretty big gamble. The whole point of being subtle is to accept the risk that people won’t notice, which works well for art but not for traffic signs.
That’s not really my purpose with this, though. The purpose of this idea is mainly to liberate yourself from the urge to impress people at all. Again, you can’t always afford to do that—we all know a job interview is not the moment for modesty—so the scope would have to be limited to those situations where looking clever really isn’t all that important, but I think that still covers a sizeable proportion of them. Including, very much, writing comments on LessWrong that may or may not contain the word ‘obviously’.
If you feel like writing about it, I’d like to hear how exactly LW influenced your life.
Hm, maybe I will. : )
It definitely feels like it’s been a tremendously good influence on me, even if it might be more challenging to find hard evidence to support that feeling (and we know how important that is). At the very least, I feel that I’ve learned so much about advanced reasoning skills and about biases and pitfalls that can get in your way if you don’t take them into account.I’d say the Human’s Guide to Words is a great example of a sequence that’s helped me think in ways that are less likely to be baffled by or misinterpret complicated situations. The notion that a label has no intrinsic importance, and that its applicability is completely irrelevant and uninteresting if you already know all the features that would be implied by your possible usage of that label, sure saves you a lot of trouble when it comes to defining your identity and dealing (or not bothering to deal) with people who are going to insist that you are or are not an X.
Well, my first thought reading this was “look at that, worrying about what people think of you and trying to look cool messes everything up again.”
This ‘obviously’ insertion trick may be rewarded with social pretentiousness brownie points, but as we can see, it also has negative consequences that, I feel, are rather more important. As a remedy, I invite you (and everyone) to join me in working on not caring so much about sounding cool enough.
This is an ongoing project of mine and I’m not nearly at a point yet where social insecurity and pretentiousness don’t make any of my decisions for me any more, but at least realising that these are petty and counterproductive things to worry about helps to loosen their grip on your brain a bit.
I’m working on a brand of modesty based on the hypothesis that if you’re really good at something, people will often notice it even if you don’t signal it, and a need to signal it is just costly nonsense that biases you and gets in the way of your peace of mind, and might even get you stuck in delusions of entitlement to admiration that you haven’t earned. And I appease my remaining urge for pretentiousness with the thought that being noticeably great at something without showing it off makes you look all the more badass. Someone with an amazing skill you never would have known they had (and if they’ve had that hidden in them, who knows what else they can do!) seems a lot cooler to me than someone—even a more skilled person—who milks their merits for every last thumbs-up they can get out of them.Note however that I am not involved with important political matters where my reputation as a Very Smart Person could actually benefit me in more substantial ways than ego boostery.
I love your phrasing.