Can we taboo ‘self’? I think I might be working with an incorrect model of what it is, exactly, that you are asserting.
I’m finding it difficult, without positing the existence of myself, to explain some of my observations. For example: all of them.
Maelin
Karma: 589
I plan to attend.
A while back I decided it was time to stop cryocrastinating, and discovered that CI do not offer any collection services to where I live and seemed to be largely “you’re on your own if you’re outside the US” while Alcor had… some kind of international process that I couldn’t really clarify despite asking.
Eventually I got sick of Alcor seeming to only check their emails once per week and abandoned the whole quest. So I got pushed away from CI because they refused to help me in Australia, and pushed away from the other org because they consistently gave the impression of being hugely uninterested.
Now I just hope I don’t die until A) one of the existing organisations starts acting like they actually want me to sign up, or B) someone better opens up shop.
Looks like a daylight saving mixup! The meetup actually starts at 7pm.
Our meetup scheduling code might need a look, too.
I intend to be there.
I should be there.
It’s actually really quite neat when you finally understand all the component ideas and how they work to create the rainbow. The other day I was driving my car and noticed that the conditions were right for a rainbow, and when I looked in the correct direction, there it was. It was pretty satisfying!
Saying “you cannot” is awfully gutsy.
True, let’s say that I’d bet my house on it not being done in my lifetime.
To quote the article, “The map is not the territory, but you can’t fold up the territory and put it in your glove compartment.” Eliezer’s point is not that we should discard all our higher level models. Of course you can’t feasibly build a working 747 using a subatomic particle model. Of course you need to use higher level models if you want to get any useful work done. His point is that we need to recognise that they are models; that the universe does not really work with different rule sets for different levels.
A street directory of your town isn’t actually your town. It is important to understand this, so you don’t end up trying to go to your friend’s house by jumping up and down on the appropriate page. But that doesn’t mean you should throw the street directory away.
Success!
Okay it’s Monday night and I am really struggling to summon the motivation to go for my walk even though I’m a day late and none of my usual online chatting friends are around so I’m using fear of humiliation in front of people I respect as a motivational tool.
If I don’t go out for my walk within the next five minutes I want everyone at this meetup to express disappointment at me.
I expect to be there.
Upvoted for valid point. I agree, but I think there is enough of a difference between ‘being treated as worthy of respect’ and ‘not being banned’ that we can probably ride in the middle ground comfortably without any significant image damage.
On consideration, though… maybe I’m prejudiced against banning because of the sense of finality of it. I guess it’s not hard to make a new account.
I’m still opposed to deleting past comments though, because deleted comments make a mess of the history.
Yvain’s post The Apologist and the Revolutionary from a couple of years ago had some fascinating and mind-boggling discussion of other bizarre things that result from particular brain damage.
I am extremely wary of this kind of thinking. Partly because using power is a slippery slope to abusing power, and each time you use the banhammer on a maybe-troll it gets a little bit easier to use it on the next maybe-troll.
Not just because of that, but also because when other people come to a community full of self-purported rationalists, and they see someone who does not obviously and immediately pattern match as a troll receiving the banhammer for presenting community-disapproved opinions in what seems superficially to be an adequately calm and reasonable manner, that sets off the ‘cult’ alarms. It makes us look intolerant and exclusionary, even if we aren’t.
It’s fine for places like the SA forums to throw the banhammer around with reckless abandon, because they exist only for fun. But we have higher goals. We have to consider not just keeping our garden tidy, but making sure we don’t look like overzealous pruners to anybody who has a potentially nice set of azaleas to contribute.
...huh. I am either wrong about who you are, or wrong about what you do. Or both.
Sure, although updating upon reading your response, I now suspect that I have misinterpreted your comment. But I’ll explain how I saw things when I first commented.
Basically it looked like you were perceiving gRR’s argument as a specific instance of the following general argument:
(1a) lots of people might agree to take a small decrease in utility in order to provide lots of utility / avoid lots of disutility for an individual even if the total decrease in utility over all the people is substantially larger than the individual utility granted / disutility averted
(2a) whenever lots of people would agree to that, it is a good idea to do it
(3) therefore it is a good idea to take small amounts of utility from many people to give lots of utility / prevent lots of disutility to one person provided all/an overwhelming majority of the people agree to it
You were then trying to reveal the fault in gRR’s general argument by presenting a different example ($1m → $10k) and asking if the same argument would still hold there (which you presume it wouldn’t). Then you suggested throwing another premise, (1b) I have nonzero terms for others’ preferences, and presumably replacing (2a) by (2b) which adds the requirement of (1b), and asking if that would make the argument hold.
But gRR was not asserting that general argument—in particular, not premise (2a)/(2b). So it seemed like you seemed to be trying to tear down an argument that gRR was not constructing.
I feel like this is misinterpreting gRR’s comment. gRR is not claiming that nonutilitarian choices are preferable because the utility function has non-zero terms for preferences of other people. It is a necessary condition, but not a sufficient one.
My model of other people says that a significantly smaller percentage of people would accept losing a dollar in order to grant one person ten grand, than would accept a dust speck in order to save one person 50 years of torture.
That might be a bit too early. Or too late, depending.
I’ve been here since OB. I found OB by accident, I think, when I was procrastinating instead of writing my thesis. My memory is fuzzy and, I think, has possibly been overwritten when I tried to reconstruct it, but as I recall my first article was The Parable of the Dagger. I remember that at the time I was pleased with the neat logic puzzle involved in the article, and shared the puzzle with some friends. Unfortunately I don’t remember how I came upon OB in the first place.
After solving the angry frog puzzle I discovered a whole pile of rather excellent posts explaining concisely a lot of half-verbalised feelings about how people tend to think that I’d, until then, never really been able to crystallise. I remember tearing voraciously through the backlog of Eliezer’s posts, to the point that I would print posts out so I could read them on the train home.
I also can’t remember when I first became an atheist, though I know it was when I was 13-14. All these epistemically significant events in my life and I can’t remember them!
I think I was able to understand the first two, but the third one just seems to be asserting (unconvincingly: why should a hearer, if it exists, be able to hear itself?) that we are all p-zombies. I’m pretty damn sure that I, as a conscious, introspective, qualia-having, thinking entity, exist, and that is because I have an awareness of myself, and I do not accept that things that don’t exist could have properties such as ‘awareness of self’.
I obviously and definitely exist, because nonexistent entities can’t do the things that I do.