MineCanary

Karma: 90

MineCanary Jul 6, 2009, 1:06 AM
0 points
in reply to: Roko’s comment on: Not Technically Lying
I would imagine that’s not a case of stupidity, but of the brain working in a way that’s (usually, more or less) efficient. Instead of analyzing the specific words you’re using, the nurse, who has no reason not to trust you, analyzes the content of what you’re saying, the urgency and manner with which you’re presenting the evidence against this chemical that’s just “blahblahblah” to the brain.

This is a way of filtering out irrelevant content and only paying attention to what is (likely) to be relevant. I had a related problem when learning to drive—my brain doesn’t instantly process “right” or “left” as belonging to the specified direction, but when the instructor or person giving the test bellowed a word at me, I knew to turn and turned whichever way made more sense to me in context—which wasn’t always the right decision. I don’t think everyone has this thinking style, as evidenced by my instructor’s irritation with me, but it’s certainly not overall a bad one—in general, it’s probably better to pay attention to information from the environment when operating heavy machinery, to the emotional content of a social situation rather than to etymological clues, and so on.

MineCanary Jul 6, 2009, 12:53 AM
8 points
in reply to: Emily’s comment on: Not Technically Lying
I’m smiling, shaking your hand. “Yes, this was a very productive conversation! I’m sure glad I met up with you and we had this discussion!”

You think I’m going to help support you in your efforts to do whatever you’re going to do with the ideas or information you’ve shared with me tonight. Instead, I’m going to report it to another group that will stop you from doing what you want, take your ideas, or exploit the information in a way counter to your goals.

I’ve just lied by breaking the maxim of Manner.

[Edit: It’s arguable that breaking Quantity would also cover this—I didn’t say WHY it was productive—but it seems clear to me that it’s essentially a violation of Manner.]

MineCanary Jul 6, 2009, 12:48 AM
0 points
in reply to: Roko’s comment on: Not Technically Lying
We distrust someone using their SKILL and intelligence to deceive us—perhaps because it further obscures the truth, because we feel that if they can outwit us like that, the world suddenly becomes smoke and mirrors and we don’t know what side we should be fighting for.

If someone tells a lie, that keeps the game simple—no word play, no clever tricks that might have to be reasoned past, producing an existential angst that there may be nothing beyond the spin. With a lie, well, it can be easily falsified, and it can even be culturally accepted—because, hey, we all say we didn’t eat two cookies when everyone had one or wanted one but didn’t get it in time. But we don’t all try to confuse people and make them THINK—especially in settings where it’s socially agreed we don’t/shouldn’t have to.

MineCanary Jul 3, 2009, 8:54 PM
2 points
in reply to: HalFinney’s comment on: Open Thread: July 2009
Haha, if you knew you were going to die without recovering enough health to do anything else of value, only perhaps drain you family’s bank accounts and emotions, along with hospital resources, hooked up to machines, that kind of adventure SHOULD be more attractive.

I think you’re underestimating the value of an experience as you live it. I would think that the value of a happy memory is only a small fraction of the value of a good experience, and a lot of the value of the memory is in directing you to seek out further good experiences and to believe in your own ability to engage in activities with good outcomes. But these positive benefits are only valuable because while you keep the happy memories in mind, you engage in further positive experiences.

Just because you don’t remember something doesn’t mean it disappears. It’s still there—just at a certain position in time. You seem to be thinking, “Well, I can’t remember this now, I can’t remember the happiness, therefore the happiness I experienced doesn’t exist.” But remember there won’t be any you to forget how good skydiving to your death felt in retrospect, and there WILL be a you at the time of diving to feel gloriously good—as opposed to the you who could feel miserably bad over a protracted deathbed.

But I would think the most important things to do would involve loved ones—either providing for them after they’re gone or bonding as much as you can with them while they’re around. Which may makes things more painful, but at least you’ll know you had an impact on the world, could convey your ideas and values—which most of us consider as an essential part of ourselves. Other priorities for extending your influence might include writing memoirs or giving and recording a talk. You might also have something you need to do—like go see something for yourself—so you can HAVE an idea or position to record and influence others with after your life.

And certainly things like saving for your retirement would become unimportant, so your overall priorities would shift.

[Edited the sentence that starts “But remember there won’t be any you...”]

MineCanary Jul 3, 2009, 8:42 PM
0 points
on: Open Thread: July 2009
What’s a good procedure for determining whether or not to vote up a comment?

MineCanary Jul 3, 2009, 3:51 AM
0 points
in reply to: Marcello’s comment on: Harnessing Your Biases
I’m not sure what the relationship between metaphors propagating in someone’s thinking and the causal entanglement of the universe is.

I’d argue that people profit from having different ways to look at the world—even though it shares a common structure, this isn’t always locally noticeable or important, and certainly things can look different at different scales. I’m equally unsure that it matters whether or not you see an object that is fractal for the scales of relevance to you and assume it is truly fractal or just a repeating pattern on a few scales.

I agree with Psychohistorian that it’s more important that the mechanic be willing to abandon his belief with greater knowledge of the physics of the universe. But even then, facility with fractal thinking may still offer benefits.

That is: The associations in your mind are put to constant test when it comes to encountering the real world. Certainly long-term, serious misconceptions—liking seeing God in everything and missing insights into natural truth—can be quite a thing to overcome and can stifle certain important lines of thought. But for any beliefs you get from reading inadequately informed science journalism—well, the ways of thinking your mind’s going to be contaminated with are those that are prevalent in our culture, so you probably encounter them anyway. They’re also things that seem plausible to you, given your background, so you again probably already think in these terms, or the interconnectedness with all the other observations of life you’ve had is too small to distinguish between two alternate explanations—the false one you’ve just read and the real truth, which is “out there” still. And if scientific results were really so obvious from what we already know about the universe, research would be a lot less important—rather, it is because scientific findings can offer counter-intuitive results, ways of thinking that we DON’T find useful or essential in everyday life, that we find them so intriguing.

MineCanary Jul 3, 2009, 3:25 AM
0 points
on: Harnessing Your Biases
Although it’s interesting to ask whether talking in a group about something you read in a possibly-wrong article doesn’t provide opportunities for people with more expertise than you to disseminate their knowledge. And for people with worse epistemologies to insist that they have more expertise than you and are disseminating their knowledge.

Certainly I find out a lot more about all the things I classify as “probably true” by talking to other people who have a different set of “probably trues” on the topic than I do by looking up as much information as I can find about each possibly-true. Do you gain more (or contribute more to the world) by classifying everything as “unknown” unless you have investigated it sufficiently and therefore not speaking on it, or by treating your knowledge as something worthy of conversation—with caveats, like “I read it in so-and-so, and they’ve been known to sensationalize or get science wrong, but...” or “I haven’t followed up on this in a couple of years, but I heard there was a promising claim...” Then this may spur someone who knows more (or less) to speak up and may cause some further search for the truth later.

It seems to me that the main problem arises when someone bickers bitterly for a fact they’ve accepted to be recognized as true even when they shouldn’t feel that certain. Of course, there is damage done in miscommunication, as when someone gets the impression (we’ll say it’s nobody’s fault) that your pure speculation or dubious source is solid fact. And the best defense against that is knowledge of how much social wisdom is BS.

Perhaps it would be better to recognize that you have another class of filing information—”I’ve heard no contradictory evidence, it’s useful to think about, but I wouldn’t build a bridge on its blueprints.” Going beyond that on a few statements may very well be quite a good thing, but I doubt it will eliminate altogether your tendency to remember and mention dubious facts.

MineCanary Jul 3, 2009, 2:51 AM
0 points
in reply to: dclayh’s comment on: The Domain of Your Utility Function
Or perhaps the pain of being a survivor when other’s didn’t and when you could have saved them (which can have an ongoing effect for the rest of your life) would outweigh the pleasure you could experience as a person living with survivor’s guilt.

Although, if you were rational, you could probably overcome the survivor’s guilt, but still.

I think in actual humans, if you were using this model as a metaphor for how they think, you’d have to say they sometimes irrational perceive another’s brain as their own, so they’re counting the net pleasure of the people they save in the utility calculation for their future mind. After all, throughout the past they’ve been able to derive pleasure from other people’s pleasure or from imagining it, and it takes rational thought to eliminate that component from the calculation upon realizing that their brain will no longer be able to feel.

MineCanary Jul 3, 2009, 2:08 AM
6 points
in reply to: Nanani’s comment on: Open Thread: July 2009
Your probability estimates about how many years of health you’ll have have changed considerably, so you wouldn’t expect to continue with the exact same behavior.

For instance, if you’ve been working on something that would take you several more years of good health to accomplish, you might want to spend a month finding someone to carry it on for you who’s similarly motivated and making it easier for them to carry it on.

Or you might decide that you don’t care about that long-term goal enough to justify the time and effort it would take away from other things that are more important for you to do in your life, but that you would have spread out over a longer timespan if you were going to live longer and accomplish a number of less-important goals or ones that are only achievable if you have more time to work on them.

You might also realize that the things you want are considerably different than the ones you thought you wanted. Maybe that was previously “playing the game wrong”, but I can’t see how a human could rule out the possibility of themself having a change in outlook/values/expectations after getting such news, which may have an impact on basic motivations as well as shifting attention from old lines of thinking, which they may have tried to make very rational, to ones that they may have been neglecting—and I seriously doubt anyone lacks these. Shifts in where they reason and rationalize.

/shrugs

MineCanary Jul 3, 2009, 1:55 AM
3 points
on: Open Thread: July 2009
What are some suggestions for approaching life rationally when you know that most of your behavior will be counter to your goals, that you’ll know this behavior is counter to your goals, and you DON’T know whether or not ending this division between what you want and what you do (ie forgetting about your goals and why what you’re doing is irrational and just doing it) has a net harmful or helpful effect?

I’m referring to my anxiety disorder. My therapist recently told me something along the lines of, “But you have a very mild form of conversion disorder. Even though your whole body gets paralyzed, whereas you could function with just a hand paralyzed, most people with the disorder aren’t aware that it has a psychological cause, and they worry about it all the time, going to doctor after doctor to try to get a physical cure.” It doesn’t FEEL mild when I’ve been barely able to move for eight hours and finally get going enough to log onto the computer and waste time browsing online. Insight can be painful when you have so long to dwell on it.

My current thinking is that the best way to get what I want out of life is to get treatment, which I am doing, and to keep an optimistic view of my ability to be non-disabled. It’s gotten a lot better, but I still spend a considerable amount of time making very bad decisions, or having the anxiety make them for me.