Already done this to myself—it lowers your self-esteem enormously.
Insert_Idionym_Here
Karma: 90
I used to do exactly this, but I created whole backstories and personalities for my “hats” so that they would be more realistic to other people.
It might be more accurate to say that pretty much everything, including what we call biology and physics—humans are the ones codifying it -- is memetically selected to be learnable by humans. Not that it all develops towards being easier to learn.
May I ask how many people any of you have seen walking around entirely barefoot, as opposed to wearing minimalist footwear of any kind?
To be perfectly honest, at the time I simply planted my face on the table in front of me a few times. I was at a dinner party with friends of my mother’s; I would have sounded extremely condescending otherwise.
That is what happened to me.
The lack of this knowledge got me a nice big “most condescending statement of the day award” in lab a year ago.
I have attempted using this in more casual decision making situations, and the response I get is nearly always something along the lines of “Okay, just let me propose this one solution, we won’t get attached to it or anything, just hear me out...”
One could attempt to fight that by reducing the number or frequency of M&Ms eaten over a long period of time, essentially weaning one’s self off of extrinsic rewards.
I agree. I think that failure mode might then be better avoided by restricting possible “somethings”, as opposed to adding another requirement on to one’s reasons for wanting to be rational.
If you have “something to protect”, if your desire to be rational is driven by something outside of itself, what is the point of having a secret identity? If each student has that something, each student has a reason to learn to be rational—outside of having their own rationality dojo someday—and we manage to dodge that particular failure mode. Is having a secret identity a particular way we could guarantee that each rationality instructor has “something to protect”?
But don’t you want to understand the underlying principles?
It seems that in order to get Archimedes to make a discovery that won’t be widely accepted for hundreds of years, you yourself have to make a discovery that won’t be widely accepted for hundreds of years; you have to be just as far in the dark as you want Archimedes to be. So talking about plant rights would probably produce something useful on the other end, but only if what you say is honestly new and difficult to think about. If I wanted Archimedes to discover Bayes’ theorem, I would need to put someone on the line who is doing mathematics that is hundreds of years ahead of their time, and hope they have a break-through.
I applaud your fourth paragraph.
I think that perhaps you may be missing the point.
I’m thinking about why I care about why I care about what I’m thinking, and I’m realizing that I have other things that I need to do, and that realization is not helping me get past this moment.
One: I support the above post. I’ve seen quite a few communities die for that very reason.
Two: Gurren Lagann? (pause) Gurren Lagann? Who the h*ll do you think I am?
I used to live in Ann Arbor, rather recently. I live in Saginaw now.
I believe the point is that we do not know how much more is possible, or what circumstances make that so. As such, we must check, as often as we can, to make absolutely sure that we are still held by our chains.
I think you enormously over-state the difficulty of lying well, as well as the advantages of honesty.