Yeah, strong endorsement of treating this as eigenvectors rather than category-buckets.
ialdabaoth
Karma: 4,810
One serious problem I see:
This whole setup presupposes something like a Standard Model spacetime as the ‘seed substrate’ upon which Boltzmann brains or Boltzmann simulations are generated.
It completely neglects the possibility that our entire universe, and all its rules, are themselves the result of a Boltzmann simulation spawned in some simpler and more inherently fecund chaos.
1. I see you haven’t been reading other articles very closely. Given that, I don’t expect you to have read this one very closely. Or that you would read a long reply that I might give very closely. Therefore, why should I spend the effort on it, just so we can get into another arc of pedantry? I don’t really have a stake in it, you see.
2. Basically the same answer as 1. If someone else wants to expand, I’m sure they can; I’d appreciate if they did, but not to feed you.
3. Looks like Daystar Eld already started here, I think it’d be neat if other people would provide more.
One aside:
I mention in ‘Shovelers are Hufflepuff’ that the credit for solving a Bullshit Mountain doesn’t go to the Hufflepuffs who actually solve it.
What DOES happen is, it goes to the Gryffindors who rush in to slay the biggest Dragon that the shovelers uncover. Since the Dragon-slaying is the biggest salient change, all progress gets attributed to it, including the progress made by the shovelers clearing out Bullshit Mountain in the first place.
If you want to poach Hufflepuff virtue, the best way to do it is to be the kind of Gryffindor that knows how to get along with Hufflepuffs, and then slay all the dragons as they uncover them. You probably won’t even be resented by them for it!
You’ll still be a bit of a dick, though.
An Ontology of Systemic Failures: Dragons, Bullshit Mountain, and the Cloud of Doom
What if you have lots of debt (>$50k us) and no investments or assets?
Is attempting to pay off a debt still the same as a “risk free” investment if you’ve had the experience of attempting to pay off a debt, only to have the owed party accept your money and then not lower the debt? I.e., if you have a known and verifiable risk that handing the owed party money won’t lower your debt (say, due to perfectly legal bureaucratic shenanigans), is that the same as a high-risk anti-debt?
If you have no assets and no liquidity, are your debts even real?
Scalability depends on location, as well. And on having someone with the right spiritual/aesthetic sense to be able to independently generate the following intuitions, and other intuitions from the same place:
If you want to do Summer Solstice on the East coast, start at dawn rather than finishing at sunset.
If you’re on neither coast, find the highest mountain you can, and figure out whether sunrise or sunset is correct based on which direction is more obviously liminal.
Know how to direct the flow of people at the correct moments, so that they can all wind up in the same space at the appropriate times while still being completely unrestrained during the rest of the day, and without anyone *realizing* that their flow is being directed.
Have the courage to not give in to people who want to “lower the bar” on activity / effort, because they cannot meaningfully participate in a high-effort activity. Try to accommodate those people if at all possible, but never at the cost of lowering the maximum effort that the highly energetic people are allowed to throw in.
Yeah. Also, I’ve been actively kicked out of too many groups of close friends that I personally formed with my own agency and initiative.
“Once you’re in, you’re in for life” just doesn’t work.
Sure. But in the meantime, realize that the fact that Val’s comment was downvoted into the negatives is a signal about something, and it’s about something you and Ben and Ollie and Kaj are doing.
And then decide whether you’re okay with all the consequences of that.
Well, we do now.
I anticipate that your tech solution will also help Eliezer come back—my intuition says that this is part of what he feels aversion to wasting energy on.
We have limited cognition and limited emotional investment, much of which has already just been spent on creating what is hopefully a high-quality post. ONE person doing it through status-seeking creates like 10 copy-cats, of which eight probably ARE doing it genuinely.
But giving them all the benefit of the doubt lets the status-seeking saboteur hide among the rest, and separating them all out takes effort that wears down the author.
It’s not sustainable.
Fictionalized examples, of course, give a convenient amount of wiggle room as to who’s on which side of the example in the non-fictionalized real world.
I disagree. How do we resolve who’s right, within the current trust environment?
It hilights problematic assumptions that lead to problematic voting patterns.
Aaaaand now we really ARE meta.
Even though it had equally suspect connotation?
1. It’s not a change in topic. It’s an explicit focus on the topic-in-question, and an attempt to explain—in a way that people’s guts will *get* - WHY the current equilibrium is preferred to the one being proposed by the author.
2. At no point does it even connotationally say “yay abuse”. It DOES connotationally call out humans-as-a-process for consistently performing actions that signal “yay abuse”, however. Connotationally saying “yay abuse” would have been phrased very differently, and I think we all know that.
3. Controversiality has less to do with opt-in/opt-out, and more to do with… who we think the connotations are making look bad. I’d really like that to stop.
I’ve been saying this for awhile, yeah.
The promotion is already happening in revealed preference, to lethal consequence. I’m just keeping score.
The liability hot potato itself is a Bullshit Mountain. Once the liability hot potato becomes a cause for multiple symptoms downstream of it, you’re in Cloud of Doom territory. So the ultimate problem is contextual—are you operating at a level of control where you can directly confront the LHP? If so, pick your causes and start shoveling. Or are you at a level of control where the downstream effects of the LHP are themselves the landscape you have to navigate? If so, welcome to your Cloud of Doom.