controversial topics, such as (...) interpretations of quantum physics.
I love that this is a thing here.
Fyrius
Karma: 289
Side note: damn. You could turn that into an amazing existential dread sci-fi horror novel.
Imagine discovering that you are a modelled person, living in a rashly designed AI’s reality simulation.
Imagine living in a malfunctioning simulation-world that uncontrolledly diverges from the real world, where we people-simulations realise what we are and that our existence and living conditions crucially depend on somehow keeping the AI deluded about the real world, while also needing the AI to be smart enough to remain capable of sustaining our simulated world.
There’s a plot in there.
Interesting read! That makes sense.
One little side note, though.
So, ceritus paribus,
Did you mean ceteris paribus?
(Ha, finally a chance for me as a language geek to contribute something to all the math talk. :P )
I’m thankful this TV tropes page helpfully provided a synopsis of your fanfic for context. I wouldn’t have understood you without it.
(Is the conditional probability that a given person had read all your fanfics, given that she visits LessWrong, high enough to overcome the low prior probability that a given person has read all your fanfics?)
Oh, right. I see.
I’ve read two non-Stover Star Wars novels and judging from those, your rule might be a good idea.
What’s this about an example of a prisoner’s dilemma in Traitor, though? I read that one too, but I don’t remember what part you’re referring to. (Well, there was a prisoner who had a dilemma, but...)
I don’t know what example you are referring to
I’m quoting the essay.
For example, in Book I of the Republic, when Cephalus defines justice in a way that requires the returning of property and total honesty, Socrates responds by pointing out that it would be unjust to return weapons to a person who had gone mad or to tell the whole truth to such a person. What is the status of these claims that certain behaviors would be unjust in the circumstances described? Socrates does not argue for them in any way. They seem to be no more than spontaneous judgments representing “common sense” or “what we would say.” So it would seem that the proposed analysis is rejected because it fails to capture our intuitive judgments about the nature of justice.
Justice is subjective, after a fashion. It is a set of intuitions, systematised into commonly accepted laws, which can change over time. Whether people are in jail isn’t part of the phenomenon ‘justice’, only of how people act on these subjective ideas. On the other hand, people can be rightly-imprisoned-for-me and undeservedly-imprisoned-for-you if we disagree about the law.
Such as, in this ancient example, understanding ‘the nature of justice’, as if that were some objective phenomenon.
I’m not up to date on philosophy since covering the drop-dead basics in high school seven years ago, so ignore this if modern philosophy has explicitly reduced itself to the cognitive science of understanding the mental machinery that underlies our intuitions. From what snippets I hear, though, I don’t get that impression.
After a proposed analysis or definition is overturned by an intuitive counterexample, the idea is to revise or replace the analysis with one that is not subject to the counterexample. Counterexamples to the new analysis are sought, the analysis revised if any counterexamples are found, and so on...
Interestingly, that sounds a lot like (an important part of) how linguistics research works. Of course, it’s a problem for philosophy because it doesn’t see itself as a cognitive science like linguistics does, and it endeavours to do other things with this approach than deducing the rules of the system that generates the intuitions.
Long quote to make a simple point, but relevant. (Context: this is from a Star Wars novel, so it’s fiction.)
A death hollow is a low point where the heavier-than-air toxic gases that roll downslope from the volcanoes can pool.
The corpse of a hundred-kilo tusker lay just within its rim, its snout only a meter below the clear air that could have saved it. Other corpses littered the ground around it: rot crows and jacunas and other small scavengers I didn’t recognize, lured to their deaths by the jungle’s false promise of an easy meal.
I said something along these lines to Nick. He laughed and called me a Balawai fool.
“There’s no false promise,” he’d said. “There’s no promise at all. The jungle doesn’t promise. It exists. That’s all. What killed those little ruskakks wasn’t a trap. It was just the way things are.”
Nick says that to talk of the jungle as a person-to give it the metaphoric aspect of a creature, any creature-that’s a Balawai thing. That’s part of what gets them killed out here.
It’s a metaphor that shades the way you think: talk of the jungle as a creature, and you start treating it like a creature. You start thinking you can outsmart the jungle, or trust it, overpower it or befriend it, deceive it or bargain with it.
And then you die.
“Not because the jungle kills you. You get it? Just because it is what it is.” These are Nick’s words. “The jungle doesn’t do anything. It’s just a place. It’s a place where many, many things live… and all of them die. Fantasizing about it—pretending it’s something it’s not—is fatal. That’s your free life lesson for the day,” he told me. “Keep it in mind.”
I will.
Mace Windu, in Shatterpoint by Matthew Stover
Right. More concisely put: If you do so-and-so, it may expand the set of things you can attain, but it won’t remove all limitations.
Good quote, of course, but it’s against one of the rules:
Do not quote comments/posts on LW/OB
It’s always “you can do anything” and never “you can do more than you currently believe you’re capable of” with these motivational quotes.
Seconded.
I beg to differ.
concealing another person whom replaces the experimenter as the door passes.
(Very minor and content-irrelevant point here, but my grammar nazi side bids me to say it, at the risk of downvotery: it should be “who” here, not “whom”, since it’s the subject of the relative clause.)
...screw it, I’m not growing up.
That’s a modest thing to say for a vain person. It even sounds a bit like Moore’s paradox—I need advice, but I don’t believe I do.
(Not that I’m surprised. I’ve met ambivalent people like that and could probably count myself among them. Being aware that you habitually make a mistake is one thing, not making it any more is another. Or, if you have the discipline and motivation, one step and the next.)
Well. Surely that’s only part of the real purpose of the scientific method.
I’m really very happy that this whole website/community exists! I think it’s one of the best influences on my life that I can think of.
Honestly, the world is a terribly confusing place to me. I’m not natively good at forming opinions — probably worse still than the average untrained person. And there are so many people very firmly believing contradictory things about so many things, and so many arguments that seem so convincing and still turn out to be wrong, so many different strands of dark side epistemology. LessWrong, to me, is an oasis of sanity in that landscape of discord. LessWrong represents a school of thought that teaches you how to wade through the fog without stumbling quite as much, making the Problem of Figuring Out What To Believe a lot more manageable.
And I like how there’s no angry talk here, just an academic atmosphere of unjudging curiosity. I appreciate that too.