Logos01

Karma: 310

Logos01 Apr 25, 2012, 2:52 AM
0 points
in reply to: wedrifid’s comment on: Be Happier

This is just what they happen to do.

This is nonsensical. Do we always conform to patterns merely because they’re the patterns we always adhered to, unquestioningly? The question is being asked now.

If there is no decent answer—then what justifies this article?

Logos01 Apr 24, 2012, 11:26 PM
4 points
in reply to: Richard_Kennaway’s comment on: Be Happier

I meant, borrowing your words, are you consumed with a driving ambition or devotion to achieving the uttermost limits of what you could achieve or become, utilizing the maximum of your potential to impact the world? Are you always striving for something you don’t have; wishing to be more than you are in every possible sense of the word… including the efficacy with which you strive for more?

Not as much as I should be.

And if so, what are you doing about it?

1) Completely overhauling my professional capacity and career-path. In the last two years I’ve changed tracks to the point where my income has doubled year-over-year from that point, and am set to another ‘doubling’.

2) I am systematically seeking out those areas where I am most deficient and am seeking means to bypass, exploit, or otherwise mitigate or account for those deficiencies. I have had setbacks and failures across the board, but I do not allow them to stop me. I have had a total collapse of my professional, personal, social, and romantic lives/livelihoods on more than one occassion, and in each instance I’ve “dusted myself off and picked back up again” as it were. I’m currently working on how to rebuild my social life (as it is utterly lacking) but I suspect that once my fiscal situation becomes stabilized at the newly higher point I’ll have more attentional reserves available to dedicate to this. Another area I am constantly lacking in since my teen years is my physical excellence and dietary habits. I don’t have the cognitive/attentional reserves to address the exercise regimen just yet, but that’s coming. The diet I also am working on; exposing myself to new foods and food combinations in order to expand my pallatte (as an autist this is an exceptional challenge for me in ways that are non-obvious.)

None of these things are, to be quite frank, particularly pleasant. I typically can’t stand people for example; and though I have been told time and again I make an “excellent” host/guest/conversationalist/party-goer… it’s physically exhausting to me (this is related to cognitive deficiencies on my part; I am unable to ‘filter’ out things and must consciously assign attentional levels to all things around me—try staying perfectly alert in complex settings for, say, an hour or two and you’ll get why being around groups of people is exhausting to me.). Despite this I have raised that as a priority on my regimen because being able to cause compliance in people without their perceiving it as duress is useful. This is also why I’ve been teaching myself how to code; and why I also pay attention to any manner of topics.

I could keep going down the list, but that about summarizes it.

Logos01 Apr 24, 2012, 11:15 PM
2 points
in reply to: Raemon’s comment on: Be Happier
Not fulfilling the potential itself, but rather the capacity to do so, (which can only properly be measured by the actualization / acting-upon-of said capacity). As to why—well, fundamentally it’s the notion that maximized instrumentality is the maximally optimal instrumental state. From there the question becomes; “is maximized instrumentality useful?”

That is a “self-proving” terminal value. One need only ask the question to see that it implies its answer. “Is being useful useful?” Well… yes. Whatever it is you want to do or achieve is transparent / irrelevant to this.

Being useful is useful. The “use” of being useful is that it’s useful.

These are essentially tautological statements.

So when I ask, “what’s the use of being happy”—saying “It makes you happy” is true (tautologically) but not an expression of utility, whereas having utility is useful because it’s useful is also tautologically true but is an expression of utility.

Logos01 Apr 24, 2012, 11:04 PM
2 points
in reply to: adamisom’s comment on: Be Happier

Emotion dressed up as pseudo-intellectualism. How do I know that/ Because the answer is so supremely obvious.

… Is there maybe some other manner in which I could explain that I was revealing my emotional biases in order to get them out of the way of the dialogue that would be more effective for you?

… What exactly is so baffling? People want to be happy for it’s own sake

Why? The position is alien to me.

but in the end you’re going to be faced with the fact that it’s just a terminal value and you’re going to have a hard time “explaining” it.

Handwaving is non-explanation. You might as well say “because magic”. I was opening myself up to the dialogue of perhaps exploring mindspace alien to me—and giving others the opportunity to do so in kind.

P.S. The specific use of the word contemptible is what tipped me off to the fact that you’re not emotionally prepared to ask a good question here.

:-|

That’s all I got. Maybe someone better suited to the dialogue will come along. Thanks for your time I guess?

Logos01 Apr 24, 2012, 11:00 PM
0 points
in reply to: Richard_Kennaway’s comment on: Be Happier
That question segfaults in my parser.

Logos01 Apr 24, 2012, 4:03 PM
0 points
in reply to: Richard_Kennaway’s comment on: Be Happier

“Happiness” is neither to be aimed at nor avoided. Doing what you truly want is to be aimed at, and not avoided.

So then you reject altogether the core premise of the article, which also stated; “Actively want to be happier. Motivation and investment matter.”

Of course, I can also note that the only way, from my perspective, to guarantee your maximal significance (in terms of material impact upon the world) -- is to always strive for something you don’t have; to wish to be more than you are in every possible sense of the word… including the efficacy with which you strive for more.

In other words; to ‘condemn’ yourself to always be incapable of doing what you “truly want”—because you will never, ever be good enough at getting better.

Logos01 Apr 24, 2012, 7:07 AM
1 point
in reply to: fubarobfusco’s comment on: Be Happier

Might be fun?

Okay. So what?

Sure beats the alternative?

Does it? Why? What is the alternative? How is ‘happy’ better?

It’s compatible with all the good drugs and keeps you off all the bad ones?

I can’t help but not that this is post hoc ergo propter hoc reasoning.

Let’s engage in a bit of an exercise. I am a thirty year old man. I have never in my life experienced happiness. I have no prospects of becoming happy. Everyone I have ever seen who was happy seemed, in many fundamental ways, contemptible to me: they were complacent, they were ‘satisfied’; they settled and lacked any driving ambition or devotion to achieving the uttermost limits of what they could achieve or become. They did not utilize the maximum of their potential to impact the world, and instead… seem less.

Explain to me why I should want to be like that. What is useful about this? Why is it good?

I am open to total revision of my worldview. I come to this dialogue with a history that I relate only to reveal my preconceptions; that they might be accounted for.

So to hug the hypothesis: “What’s so great about being happy?”

Logos01 Apr 24, 2012, 6:39 AM
1 point
on: Be Happier
Alright… after reading through much of this, a certain line struck me over and over again.

Actively want to be happier. Motivation and investment matter.

I have only one question.

Why?

(To clarify: I mean: Why be happy? Why want to be happy? How is it useful? What ‘good’ is happiness?)

Logos01 Apr 24, 2012, 3:39 AM
6 points
in reply to: SkyDK’s comment on: Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread, part 16, chapter 85
Emotional blackmail on LeStrange. Also—half a year is too long a time period. by far.

Figure without time turners but with healing magics and potions an eight month birth. Rip the kid out of her womb, and heal her back into active duty. You lose her services for maybe a month. (Up to six months in and she’s still combat-capable.)

Heal both kid and mother, and there you go. (also, if we can assume accelerated gestation potions then we get even more silly. No “downtime” at all No need for time turners.)

Visual maps of the historical arguments in the topic, “Can computers think?”

Logos01Apr 18, 2012, 12:55 AM

7 points

1 comment1 min readLW link

Logos01 Apr 6, 2012, 12:43 PM
5 points
in reply to: FeepingCreature’s comment on: Forked Russian Roulette and Anticipation of Survival
It’s the same argument though.

How much money would I have to pay you for you to let me rape you in a way that causes no physical trauma, after dosing you with a drug that prevents you from remembering the hour before or after it?

Would that dollar amount change if I told you I had already given you the drug?

The problem I see is your treatment of this arrangement as a “black box” of you[entering] and you[exiting]. But this is illegitimate. There were ten rounds of you[copy-that-dies] that would also be you[entering].

Have you read EY’s writings on timeless decision theory? It seems to me that this is a variation.

Logos01 Apr 3, 2012, 3:02 AM
−4 points
in reply to: Desrtopa’s comment on: Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread, part 13, chapter 81

So instead of a war, let’s look at a potential asteroid strike.

I didn’t say that there weren’t good reasons for resisting the pointlessly-occurring phenomenon. I said only that it was pointless. Or are you now going to impose fundamental purposefulness and agency onto the very fabric of the cosmos? This gets exceedingly ridiculous. I have never once argued that your usage is invalid. Why do you insist on refusing to recognize mine, despite the legitimacy of the terms and the framing with which I have presented them demonstrating clearly that I was using a definition you were not?

This is what passes for reasoned discourse?

Revise your position.

but the idea that it’s somehow more pointless to resist utility hits

Oh bloody hell. I never said anything of the sort. Update your position, and stop tilting at windmills. This conversation has ceased, in the meantime, to be worthy of any investment by me.

Logos01 Apr 2, 2012, 6:49 PM
−8 points
in reply to: Desrtopa’s comment on: Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread, part 13, chapter 81

If they lost things “for no good reason,” every war of defense ever engaged in is pointless and futile. You might be able to define your terms such that this is the case, but it’s tremendously misleading.

Reductio ad absurdum much? Wars of defense fought against an enemy with at least the facsimile of a legitimate cause—historical hatred, societal need to expand (or else face their own extinguishment), and so on—represent something more than “for the hell of it”. Fighting a defensive war against an enemy who is doing it for the hell of it is what I labelled “pointless and futile”.

There is nothing “misleading” about this claim; there is nothing “deceptive” about this claim.

Are you even trying to read-and-comprehend anything I write here? I’m not getting that impression.

Logos01 Apr 2, 2012, 8:29 AM
−8 points
in reply to: Desrtopa’s comment on: Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread, part 13, chapter 81

Because there is already a contextual definition of “lose” with association to war that is so well established that it’s assumed by default.

Ahh, I see. Because your availability heuristic tells you it’s obvious. I’m afraid you might want to consider recalibration of your Level I cognition. It’s off.

What I here mean to say is that your rejection of other contexts within this topic demonstrates an inability to take the outside view; what’s obvious to you just, well, isn’t.

Please note: I never said that anyone had “lost the war”. I said that the war itself was futile. And it was—because they could do nothing in it but hope to mitigate losses. They had no avenue to gain. They won the war, sure; but it was a pointless war fought against an enemy who fought only because he could.

So yes. Please update your modal thinking. Yours is not the only legitimate usage of “to lose” here. After all; they did not lose the war but they sure as hell all lost something/someone. And for no good reason.

If that’s not a pointless and futile loss, I’m afraid that I simply no longer know how to speak the English language.

Logos01 Apr 2, 2012, 4:24 AM
−2 points
in reply to: Desrtopa’s comment on: Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread, part 13, chapter 81

but if you’re going by a definition by which nearly anyone who has fought in a war on any side has lost, you’re being misleading and abusing your words.

The mere fact that you, personally, dislike the contextual definition I am using does not make that context nor the definition illegitimate.

If you suffer far lesser consequences than if your opponent were victorious, you didn’t lose.

You didn’t lose … as much as you could have. You still lost. If you do not gain at least as much as is taken from you, that is a loss. If you gamble twenty dollars and win a five dollar pot; you have won your wager but have lost fifteen dollars. Did you lose as much as you could have had you lost the wager altogether? No. But you still are down in real terms; you have still lost compared to before the wager.

There is absolutely nothing misleading about this. There is nothing abusive of the words about this. It’s a simple factual and literal use of the term “to lose”. It really doesn’t matter if you were forced into the wager; you have still lost.

This is a legitimate usage of the term, “to lose”, and I really don’t see why you’re so vehemently opposed to it.

Logos01 Apr 2, 2012, 3:29 AM
0 points
in reply to: hairyfigment’s comment on: Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread, part 13, chapter 81
Wait—where does Snape, of all people, come into this discussion?

Logos01 Apr 2, 2012, 3:28 AM
−1 points
in reply to: Desrtopa’s comment on: Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread, part 13, chapter 81
The mere fact that they defeated their enemy does not mean that they did not lose. A war fought for no greater reason than that your opponent wishes to fight you is a pointless and futile one: you have nothing to gain, and only things to lose.

They were victorious, yes; but they lost. Based on the descriptions of how “everyone” has someone they lost in that war—they lost greatly. Winning a war doesn’t mean you don’t lose things during the fight.

Logos01 Apr 2, 2012, 3:26 AM
1 point
in reply to: TimS’s comment on: Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread, part 13, chapter 81
I’m not equivocating; I’m equating. Political power is political capital; political capital is political power. If you have one, you have the other.

Logos01 Mar 30, 2012, 8:38 PM
−1 points
in reply to: Desrtopa’s comment on: Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread, part 13, chapter 81
… who also watched as his friends, loved ones, and family all died in a pointless, futile war against an enemy who is not dead.

Logos01 30 Mar 2012 3:54 UTC
2 points
in reply to: pedanterrific’s comment on: Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread, part 13, chapter 81
Honestly, that doesn’t map very well to my model of MoR!Lucius.

It would be an admission of defeat in terms of manipulation; and it would also disrupt his plans/designs to create a worthy successor in Draco.

Logos01

Vi­sual maps of the his­tor­i­cal ar­gu­ments in the topic, “Can com­put­ers think?”

Visual maps of the historical arguments in the topic, “Can computers think?”