This is true when the social systems in question are built on dishonest foundations. Observing whether or not intellectual honesty has this effect on a system has predictive value wrt the eventual fate of the society employing the system.
Voted up.
Nanani
Karma: 386
Typo-hunt: should read “abandoning arithMetic” (without the capital of course)
This comment was never intended to attract people to the site, so your last paragraph is not relevant.
Please refrain from lecturing a female on what females do or do not do.
Nitpick: “If a pen is dropped on A moon”
It doesn’t specify Earth’s moon. If a pen were dropped on say, Deimos, it might very well appear to do B) for a long moment ;) (Deimos is Mars’ outermost moon and too small to retain a round shape. Its gravity is only 0.00256 m/s^2 and escape velocity is only 5.6 m/s. That means you could run off it.)On the other hand, the word “dropped” effectively gives the game away. Things dropped go DOWN, not up, and they don’t float in place. Would be better to say “released”.
And now, back to our story…
Might it be as simple as being Special? Someone with an unusual medical problem is deserving of extra attention by virtue of having it.
Those all sound like they fit primairily into socialization, with varying doses of status thrown in.
Maybe a Venn diagram would work better than strict levels.
I’d call it “time to dust off the math books”. Incidentally, I’ve got to do just that.
“We are not born into this world, but grow out of it; for in the same way an apple tree apples, the Earth peoples.”
This statement is patently false in many ways and there is no way to justify saying that “the basic idea is indisputably correct”. The basic idea that the OP imputed was not derivable from this statement in any way that I can see. Am I missing some crucial bit of context?
Some non-trivial holes: We ARE born into this world; we do not grow out of it in any sense, even metaphorical (though I think many here hope to accomplish the feat in the future); the Earth is not an agent and does not verb-people.
The more interesting materialsm discussion is already vigorous. I choose to focus on a minor point not to detract from it.
Though you might have heard it before, the solution is most likely to find a way to support yourself through the things you already enjoy doing, and/or cultivate an interest to the point where you will be able to make money with it.
Doing so would surely be more effective than beating your head on the wall of “I can’t do it”.
Oh really? Where are you based, if you don’t mind my asking? I’m in Kansai myself.
Yes, both directions, mostly out of necessity. Being in-house, sometimes it isn’t possible to have someone on hand with the right native language. Working into my non-native language is hard, but also a great a learning experience.
Yes it does, but only incidentally. It’s been my nickname since before I realized I could write it as 72 (七二).
How are your studies progressing?
we tend to scrutinize posts/comments more carefully for flaws when they argue against beliefs that we hold
It seems likely that, given limited time to read comments, any given member will stick to the more controversial (and therefore interesting) comment threads, leading to an apparent piling on when disagreement is expressed.
Breathing oxygen isn’t a choice, though. You have to go to great lengths (such as inserting yourself into an environment where it isn’t breathable, such as vacuum or deep water) to stop breathing it for more than a few minutes before your conscious control is overriden.
This sounds a lot like people who strongly urge others to take on a life-changing decision (joining a cult of some kind, having children, whatever) by saying that once you go for it, you will never ever want to go back to the way things were before you took the plunge.
This may be true to whatever extent, and in the story that extent is absolute, but it doesn’t make for a very good sales pitch.
Can we get anything out of this analogy? If “once you join the cult, you’ll never want to go back to your pre-cult life” is unnapealing because there is something fundamentally wrong with cults, can we look for a similar bug in wireheading, perfect world simulations, and so on?
Millions of copies of you will reason as you do, yes?
So, much like the Omega hypotheticals, this can be resolved by deciding ahead of time to NOT let it out. Here, ahead of time means before it creates those copies of you inside it, presumably before you ever come into contact with the AI.
You would then not let it out, just in case you are not a copy.
This, of course, is presumed on the basis that the consequences of letting it out are worse than it torturing millions for a thousand subjective years.
Great quote, though it took me a minute to parse. I think it’s the dashes that did it. Wouldn’t this read a lot better with commas instead?
Don’t forget to consider the negative utility of an angry cat attacking the catpenny player, which will surely happen after x catpennies.
Anyone going to go looking for x? It would of course have to be statistical distribution, varying with cat age, breed, and so on.
The universe has the meaning we give it. Meaning is a perception of minds, not an inherent free-floating property of the universe.
“Maximizing truth” doesn’t make any sense. You can’t maximize truth. You can improve your knowlege of the truth, but the truth itself is independent of your brain state.
In any case, when is untruth more instrumental to your utility function than truth? Having accurate beliefs is an incredibly useful thing. You may well find it serves your utility better.
Are you sure about that? Beware generalizing from a sample of one.
Heroin addiction is in most cases carefully cultivated by the addict, for a variety of reasons, and stopping is not really difficult.
I recommend Theodore Dalrymple’s insightful book Romancing Opiates: Pharmacological Lies and the Addiction Bureaucracy for clarification as to why akrasia and heroin addiction are not related.