Well your task spec is broken, so no wonder your brain won’t be whipped into doing it.
“inspirational stuff” is a trigger for thinking in terms of things like advertising or religious revivals that are emotional grabs which are intended to disengage (or even flimflam) the reasoning faculties. Any rationalist would flinch away.
Re-frame: visualize your audience. You are looking to simply and clearly convey whatever part of their far mode utility function is advanced by the thing you are pushing.
I find it poignant that you had to expend >1000 words to tell people “obtain my consent before using my gift receiving for your pleasure”.
Sometimes I hate this society.
But I want to do math work. My inability to think in math is a serious weakness.
This slammed into my “math is hard” block. I will return and read it, but it’s going to be work.
But on pondering that, I think I realized why math is hard, compared to prose text that just presents itself as a fait accompli to my attention. (And why it is not hard, for some people who are savants.)
We are not executing mathematical computations. We are emulating a crude mathematical computer which takes the kind of explicit algorithms that are fed to students. No attempt is made to cultivate and tune a “feel” for the result (which is what executing computations would be like, since it’s what the other hard computations we do—like reading—feel like).
Just putting that out there.
FWIW, the Moby Dick example is less stupid than you paint it, given the recurrence of whiteness as an attribute of things special or good in western culture—an idea that pre-dates the invention of race. I think a case could be made out that (1) the causality runs from whiteness as a special or magical attribute, to its selection as a pertinent physical feature when racism was being invented (considering that there were a number of parallel candidates, like phrenology, that didn’t do so well memetically), and (2) in a world that now has racism, the ongoing presence of valuing white things as special has been both consciously used to reinforce it (cf the KKK’s name and its connotations) and unconsciously reinforces it by association,
Expanding a little on this, it’s not a counter argument, but a caveat to “Trust not those who claim there is no truth”. When people say things like “western imperialist science”, sometimes they are talking jibber-jabber, but sometimes they are pointing out that the victors write the ontologies and in an anthropocene world, their ideas are literally made concrete.
Two beliefs, one world is an oversimplification and misses an important middle step.
Two beliefs, two sets of evidence that may but need not overlap, and one world, is closer.
This becomes an issue when for example, one observer is differently socially situated than the other* and so one will say “pshaw, I have no evidence of such a thing” when the other says “it is my everyday life”. They disagree, and they are both making good use of the evidence reality presents to each of them differently.
(* Examples of such social situational differences omitted to minimize politics, but can be provided on request.)
If we couldn’t, even in principle, find any evidence that would make the theory more likely or less, then yeah I think that theory would be correctly labeled meaningless.
But, I can immediately think of some evidence that would move my posterior probability. If all definable universes exist, we should expect (by Occam) to be in a simple one, and (by anthropic reasoning) in a survivable one, but we should not expect it to be elegant. The laws should be quirky, because the number of possible universes (that are simple and survivable) is larger than the subset thereof that are elegant.
You’d have to define “exist”, because mathematical structures in themselves are just generalized relations that hold under specified constraints. And once you defined “exist”, it might be easier to look for Bayesian evidence—either for them existing, or for a law that would require them to exist.
As a general thing, my definition does consider under-defined assertions meaningless, but that seems correct.
I think you are playing to what you assume are our prejudices.
Suppose X is a meaningless predicate from a humanities subject. Suppose you used it, not a simulacrum. If it’s actually meaningless by the definition I give elsewhere in the thread, nobody will be able to name any Y such that p(X|Y) differs from p(X|¬Y) after a Bayesian update. Do you actually expect that, for any significant number of terms in humanities subjects, you would find no Y, even after grumpy defenders of X popped up in the thread? Or did you choose a made-up term so as to avoid flooding the thread with Y-proponents? If you expect people to propose candidates for Y, you aren’t really expecting X to be meaningless.
The Sokal hoax only proves one journal can be tricked by fake jargon. Not that bona fide jargon is meaningless.
For a belief to be meaningful you have to be able to describe evidence that would move your posterior probability of it being true after a Bayesian update.
This is a generalization of falsifiability that allows, for example, indirect evidence pertaining to universal laws.
You can’t use that tool to solve that problem.
Meanwhile, you have ⇐ 70 years to solve it another way.
At the start of the scenario, you are already dead with probability approaching 1. Trying to knock the gun away can’t hurt.
“Destroy yourself as near to immediately as possible, given that your method of self destruction causes no avoidable harm to anything larger than an ant.”
Depends who you’re speaking to, and why. To a significant extent, the “confrontational” approach wasn’t about asking for change, it was about “consciousness raising”—debiasing the self concepts of black people, fixing learned helplessness, constructing the conceptual framework to experience white supremacy as racism rather than having internalized it as legitimate.
And, to my mind, the assumption white people “won’t and/or can’t” change was well calibrated. Political anti-racism succeeded somewhat in shoving the Overton window off avowed racism and completely off avowed segregationism. Every variety of disavowed racism remains politically viable (examples: border fences, “illegals”, voter suppression laws) or even politically unassailable (examples: the drug war and its disproportionate criminalization of black people, police casual violence against black people, felon disenfranchisement coupled with the above, lack of reparations). “Color blindness” has been shown to be a cause of / form of racism, but it remains the default “liberal” position in white dominated culture.
Humans and their silly ideas of what’s complicated or not.
What I find ironic is that SI can be converted into a similarly terse commandment. “Shorter computable theories have more weight when calculating the probability of the next observation, using all computable theories which perfectly describe previous observations”—Wikipedia.
(BTW, this is an outdated opinion and I no longer think this.)
And legoland is built of stacking bricks. But try deriving legoland by generalizing a 2x2 blue square.
Human minds don’t anticipate a true sociopath who views communication (overt, emotional and habitus), as instrumental. You should already know we are easy to hack by that route.
Cooperate. I am not playing against just this one guy, but any future PD opponents. Hope the maximizer lives in a universe where it has to worry about this same calculus. It will defect if it is already the biggest bad in its universe.