So if you find you ARE that friend, presumably you’d have no fear of stepping in front of that gun barrel yourself for a few million flips right afterwards. I mean it’s pretty convincing proof. Then you get to see the confusion in each other’s face!
Though you’re both more likely to end up mopping your friend’s blood of the floor.
On the whole, I think a good friend probably doesn’t let a friend test the Quantum Theory of Immortality.
“why certain ideas are communicated only indirectly for good reasons” by Pre.
Rather than use an obscure example like Zen, we’ll use a fairly simple idea: Learning how to catch a ball.
Now I can directly explain to you how a ball is caught. I can describe the simultaneous ballistic equations that govern the flight of the ball, instruct you on how to alter your idea of where the ball will land based on Bayesian reasoning given certain priors and measured weather conditions.
These things are almost certainly needed if you’re gonna program a computer to catch a ball.
If you’re gonna teach a human to catch a ball though, you’re just going to have to throw a lot of balls at them and tell ’em to keep theirs eyes on it.
I suspect most Zen koans are just poor jokes, but if there’s a point to ’em it’s the same as the point of throwing those balls at a student catcher.
Just to get you to practice thinking in that way. Because you, as a human, will become better at the things you practice.
If the thing you are practising is spouting existential bullshit this may or may not be a good idea. ;)
I quite like the idea of infiltrating some religion and taking over. I doubt the christian ones would be the best bet, but it’s a nice plan. One of the newer religions may be more corruptible.
It’s a fantasy though, not something that I think could actually be orchestrated.
Karma here is pretty simple: You get a point for every upvote, and lose one for every downvote. You automatically upvote your own comments (unless you deliberately cancel it).
So make 20 posts that don’t get voted down and you’re there.
There’s any number of movements whose adherents have a priority of spreading the word, and right now I can’t think of a single such movement I’d want to be associated with.
Innit. Personally I think I get more out of a community with a wide range of views anyway.
I’ve never been to a mensa meeting. On the web they seem to do little other than congratulate each other for being so smart. Do they do more when they meet in meatspace?
Well, I meant that being a lone rationist doesn’t spread rationalism, essentially. If that’s the motive, you need to be more accepting of those that aren’t in order to move them towards the path.
Yes! Community matters. The support and friendship my folks get from their church is so intense, so useful to them, that I stopped trying to talk ’em out of their religion when I understood it. Unless you can replace that, give them that support and encouragement they got when my brother went schizophrenic say, you may well do them a disservice by talking them out of their religion even it if were possible.
Personally I get mine from a few places. The subgenii thing doesn’t really work well enough, there’s maybe two dozen of us active here in the whole continent. We can do about two get-togethers a year and have to fly in cross continental airplanes to do it. Lucky if half of us turn up at one one event. If you don’t also happen to be a heavy drinker you’re probably not going to fit in all that well either. The fact it’s so focused against something rather than for something can also be tricky. It’s deliberately exclusive.
More useful to me is the art community. The four nine one gallery even have a building. Squatted, of course. Nobody involved there has enough money to buy or even rent a building. The entire ethos of the folks who originally squatted that building was to use that previously unused space to encourage community projects. They use it for parties and for yoga classes and for drawing classes and there’s a cafe. There’s always people moving through, using the space. We’ll be using it for this years subgenius party come X-Day. They’re some of the most accepting friendly people I know. Having accepting, friendly leaders is surely important.
Another friend is in the process, this week even, of arranging a peppercorn rent with a landlord to move into and renovate a dilapidated building over five years, using it as a community center in the mean time. I expect I’ll do what I can to help, but I’m busy and it’s quite far from where I live.
Planet Angel aim to have a building, and to use it for similar purposes. We run monthly clubbing events to try and build that community and raise the cash to get a building through official channels rather than squatting. Well over half my friendship circle have come to me though PA over the last seven or eight years. The key to that being anything other than just another night club is the lack of any advertising. Spreading through word of mouth means ‘like minded’ people are the only people that come. You don’t get so much of the idiot trendy clubbing crowd that could destroy the friendly atmosphere. We try to organize bring-the-whole-family events a few times a year too, the night-clubbing thing is pretty restrictive if you really want to build a community.
The thing all these projects (except the subgenii one) have in common, the thing that drives whatever amount of success we’re getting, is acceptance though. None of them would work at all if we tried to include only rationalists, only the smart, only the top 5% intellectually. Indeed, they all (including the subgenii thing) include people with weird ideas about reality, people who aren’t all that smart, people who’d be bored reading lesswrong in about two minutes flat.
I think this is a good thing too. It’s pointless to be a lone rationalist, or an exclusive group. You gotta find some way to preach to the masses, and that’s only going to happen if you accept the masses, and give them that community they’re after, fill the community hole in their brains that people seem to find particularly hard to fill in big cities.
Yet you also can’t afford to grow so quickly that the group-norms are washed away, flooded with the wider society’s norms.
It’s a tricky problem
Innit. I quite like the sleep deprivation high, but it’s not a good state for thinking straight. And I also love sleeping and dreaming.
Yeah, see, figuring things out from first principles, rigorously applying your values, calculating the best option given a multi-dimensional array of preferences in various categories and doing a weighted sum on them to determine an appropriate course is a good thing. People should definitely know how to do that. I’m glad I have whatever basic grasp on the functions involved that I do have.
But it’s not actually how human beings think.
Even determining what heuristic you’d use to judge a situation’s utility on that multidimensional scale would be a monumental undertaking. It’d take an age.
What actual human beings do is let their subconscious brain do all that tricky heuristic-based summing and weighting and determining which aspects are important and then signal it up to consciousness via a wooly, fuzzy, sometimes vague, often powerful, emotional response.
Data wanted to be human, but he can never be human coz his physiology just wasn’t wired that way.
You may determine that you want to be an android, dispassionately calculating every move from first principles and values. But you just ain’t wired that way. You won’t have time to run a wetware program to emulate it. Not one that doesn’t take advantage of your emotions anyway.
God knows how an emotionless person would fair trying to predict or influence another human being’s actions.
Better to learn to hear your emotions, to understand the message they’re giving you, learn to fine-tune them if they’re lying or wrong, than to ignore them.
Oh, so like a badge to put on your profile page.
I did wonder why people joined so many pointless groups.
I think it would likely bring more facebook randoms here. Not really sure what the aims of the place are in that regard. Presumably we DO want to encourage rationality outside our own little clique, so bringing more people here would be good. But presumably we also don’t want to drown in trolls and noise and idiots and spam which is what tends to be the final result of that kinda recruitment drive.
Probably should figure out what the plan is for that before you start, effectively, advertising on facebook I reckon.
But there IS a flavour that you’d enjoy most, it’s just that without projecting yourself into that future position and imagining the emotional content of it you can’t decide which will be best.
new scientist had an article {subscription needed, mirrored here} which mentions “Elliot”, a patient described in Descarte’s Error:
Intellectually, Elliott is unimpaired. IQ and memory tests reveal nothing abnormal
. . .
Eventually the researchers trace this myopic indecisiveness to a curious absence of feeling, itself the result of damage to the frontal part of the brain’s cortex. Elliott “knows” but cannot “feel”. When confronted with pictures of people injured in gory accidents, he knows intellectually that he should feel distressedbut he doesn’t actually feel distressed
. . .
Without these emotional changes to guide his thought processes, concludes Damasio, life for Elliott is a hell of indecision. Yes, he can mull over every option ad infinitum; but when it comes to experiencing the subtle internal values and biases of feeling necessary for actually choosing between the options, “gut feelings” or “instincts” are just plain missing. Elliott, in Damasio’s own words, is “irrational concerning the larger framework of behaviour”.
Too much emotion certainly can make us irrational, but so can too little. You need to know how things will make you feel, in order to rationally chose between alternatives.
Seriously? Why? To encourage the Facebook masses to come here?
shudders *
In the Free Software movement the typical response to these kinds of demands is pretty simple, “There’s the code, please do feel free to go fix it!”
Likewise in the hippy anarchist movements if you suggest something like a rally or a sit-in the usual answer is “Sounds good, when are you going to organise it?”
Which I tend to think is pretty much the right answer. If someone can’t be bothered to do the things they suggest themselves then I can’t really understand why they think they should be able to convince others to do it for them.
The key is to make the cost for getting in there and starting to do those things really low, making the source available to everyone with a simple download, making it simple to contact the whole group and start organizing.
Personally I’ve helped with and joined loads of different cults and projects, even started one, and found that the key to getting me to do stuff to help at least is to make it both simple to do and obvious how, to ensure that I realize I don’t need permission to go do something.
You’ve said yourself that you were surprised how much of a barrier even having to send an email to OB was compared to having a big “submit your article here” button on Lesswrong,
I have vague plans to take a look at the source code for less-wrong and fix a couple of things that are annoying me, but it won’t be till after the Subgenius show I’m organizing at least, when I have a bit more time.
Oh, then microchips? Writing “IBM” in individual atoms with a scanning electron microscope? Nano-motors for nano-machines? Richard Hammond was on the TV the other week with a probing scanning electron microscope writing his name on a strand of hair. Awesome.
Do people feel awe at the Internet?
Totally. The communications network is the biggest machine ever built, it’s parts are all replaceable without damaging the whole. Maybe you’re too young to remember a time before it, but I found it at university nearly two decades ago and I was certainly awestruck.
Toilets?
Not so much. But then I did see a documentry about the building of the London sewerage system, the way the rivers were all paved over and turned into underground tunnels, connected by miles upon miles of underground canals. Which has lasted for a couple of hundred years!
A toilet might not be a massive engineering feat, but the sewer system in a whole city sure is.
Does Deep Blue have emotions?
Well, as I understand the way it works it does attach some kinda value to how ‘good’ any given board position is, then works through the tree of positions and finds the route to the ‘best’ of those positions.
Is that value an emotion?
Well no.
In a very single-dimensional way it might be a model of one though. I assume it’s probably a single real number, maybe even an integer, rather than a complex set of semantic associations.
Deep Blue is seeking just “WIN!” and labelling potential board positions accordingly whereas humans are seeking “Fun” and “Happy” and “Enough sex” and “Intellectually Interesting” and “Not scary” and god knows how many other dimensions too.
Even Spock’s most famous gesture, that single raised eyebrow of his, is an expression of puzzlement or condescension. Course, he always claimed to have emotions under check rather than wiped out.
I like the idea of Kai as an properly emotionless rationalist. A robot. My friend just called hist newborn “Kai” but he’s never seen Lexx.
I often figure that if you take emotion away from people you get Abulia rather than rationality anyway.
Heh. Yeah, only two hits on google] for ‘science is better than sex’.
I certainly have seen folks claim that LSD is better than sex of course. I’ve even been one of them at times. They’re different enough that ‘better’ changes a lot in context though. Better for what? Certainly sex if better if you only have 90 minutes. LSD’s more mind expanding though.
If I had to give one of them up, I’d give up LSD. If I had to pick one to have NEVER DONE, I’d pick sex.
Yes, it’s a great book. Read it last month and loaned it to a friend who loved it too. Stupid title though, makes it sound like a self-help book, and the cover isn’t any better.
The trouble with making these predictions really is lack of information. If you were told everything about an experience (IE you experienced it! Maybe virually) then probably your guess would be better than the advice of someone who has. But it’s impossible to do that. Spoken word certainly don’t have the bandwidth to convey an entire experience. They do have the bandwidth to convey “Was it fun?” though.
The first thing that comes to mind is maybe she’s able to teach students how to practice more in their youth than she did.
That’d work at least.