Eliezer wrote a blog post about this question!
Pfft
Karma: 1,177
Realistic kissing simulator to get over the fear of kissing
Ok, this is pretty amazing.
I guess because people want to live in the existing cities? It’s not like there is nowhere to live in California—looking at some online apartment listings you can rent a 2 bedroom apt in Bakersfield CA for $700/month. But people still prefer to move to San Francisco and pay $5000/month.
In animal training it is said that best way to get rid of an undesired behaviour is to train the animal with an incompatible behaviour. For example if you have a problem with your dog chasing cats, train it to sit whenever it sees a cat—it can’t sit and chase at the same time. Googling “incompatible behavior” or “Differential Reinforcement of an Incompatible Behavior” yields lots of discussion.
The book Don’t Shoot the Dog talks a lot about this, and suggests that the same should be true for people. (This is a very Less Wrong-style book: half if it is very expert advice on animal training, half of it is animal-training-inspired self-help, which is probably on much less solid ground, but presented in a rational, scientific, extremely appealing style.)
Nitpick: it would be better to write “also a theorem of epistemic logic”, since there are other modal logics where it is not provable. (E.g. just modal logic K).
I guess your theory is the same as what Alice Maz writes in the linked post. But I’m not at all convinced that that’s a correct analysis of what Piper Harron is writing about. In the comments to Harron’s post there are some more concrete examples of what she is talking about, which do indeed sound a bit like one-upping. I only know a couple of mathematicians, but from what I hear there are indeed lots of the social games even in math—it’s not a pure preserve where only facts matter.
(And in general, I feel Maz’ post seems a bit too saccharine, in so far as it seems to say that one-up-manship and status and posturing do not exist at all in the “nerd” culture, and it’s all just people joyfully sharing gifts of factual information. I guess it can be useful as a first-order approximation to guide your own interactions; but it seems dangerously lossy to try to fit the narratives of other people (e.g., Harron) into that model.)
What are previous examples of people on LW applying mental techniques and getting into seriously harmful states?
Source: been making my own jam for years, had plenty of time to experiment.
So did you actually make jam without sugar and then stored it for years before eating it?
In the story the superhappies propose to self-modify to appreciate complex art, not just simple porn, and they say that humans and babyeaters will both think that is an improvement. So to some degree the superhappies (with their very ugly spaceships) are repulsive to humans, although not as strongly repulsive as the babyeaters.
they are moral and wouldn’t offer a deal unless it was beneficial according to both utility functions being merged (not just according to their value of happiness).
I guess whether it is beneficial or not depends on what you compare to? They say,
he obvious starting point upon which to build further negotiations, is to combine and compromise the utility functions of the three species until we mutually satisfice, providing compensation for all changes demanded.
So they are aiming for satisficing rather than maximizing utility: according to all three before-the-change moralities, the post-change state of affairs should be acceptable, but not necessarily optimal. Consider these possibilities:
1) Baby-eaters are modified to no longer eat sentient babies; humans are unchanged; Superhappies like art.
2) Baby-eaters are modified to no longer eat sentient babies; humans are pain-free and eat babies; Superhappies like art.
3) Baby-eaters, humans, and Superhappies are all unchanged.
I think the intention of the author is that, according to pre-change human morality, (1) is the optimal choice, (2) is bad but acceptable, and (3) is unacceptable. The superhappies in the story claim that (2) is the only alternative that is acceptable to all three pre-change moralities. So the super-happy ending is beneficial in the sense that it avoids (3), but it’s a “bad” ending because it fails to get (1).
Sure, I think that was annoying. But it’s not the stated reason for the ban.
Also, “monogamy versus hypergamy” has been discussed on Less Wrong since the dawn of time. See e.g. this post and discussion in comments, from 2009. Deciding now that this topic is impermissible crimethink seems like a pretty drastic narrowing of allowed thoughts.
I… what? As I understand the comment, he wanted to ban sex outside marriage. Describing that as “women should be distributed to men they don’t want sex with” seems ridiculously exaggerated.
I agree that his one-issue thing was tiresome, and perhaps there is some argument for making “being boring and often off-topic” a bannable offense in itself. But this moderation action seems poorly thought through.
Edit: digging through his comment history finds this comment, where he writes it would be better to marry daughters off as young virgins. So I guess he did hold the view Nancy ascribed to him, even if it was not in evidence in the comment she linked to.
The ending is a bit rushed. Here’s hoping the sequel is good, it just arrived in the mail.
I thought the sequel was more boring. The structure of the books doesn’t really work very well as a series, I feel. The things that I found most appealing about Justice were the new kind of narrator (in the flashbacks, when the same events are described from multiple viewpoints of the same character), and the gradual puzzle of figuring out how the universe works. But at the end of Justice that’s all over, there is just a single ancillary left, and the whodunnit-mystery has been explained. So then Sword is a lot less novel, just another space opera...
I feel this only raises more questions. :)
The description of the use of posture in aikido is super interesting!
I’m a little worried that analogizing “mental arts” to martial arts might lead the imagination in the wrong direction—it evokes ideas like “flexible” or “balanced” etc. But thinking about mental states when I get a lot of research done, the biggest one by far is when I’m trying to prove some annoying guy wrong on an inconsequential comment thread on tumblr. If I could only harness that motivation, I’d be set for life. Thinking about aikido practitioners primes me for things like “zen-like and serene”, not “peeved and petty”.
Upvoted, but mostly for the first paragraph and photo. :)
I figured this was an absurd caricature, but then this thing floated by on tumblr:
Objective facts: white, patriarchal, heteronormative, massively racist and ableist?