RowanE

Karma: 1,045

RowanE 14 Nov 2020 13:03 UTC
2 points
in reply to: avturchin’s comment on: On Arguments for God
There’s a vast difference between being “almost god-like” and being God, and as long as you don’t equate the two then there’s no contradiction.

RowanE 17 Sep 2019 13:00 UTC
2 points
on: Is there an existing label for the category of fallacies exemplified by “paradox of tolerance”?
I don’t think I’ve ever seen the paradox of tolerance used that way. Even in the original formulation from Popper, it’s specifically an argument for restricting the principle of tolerance, based on the consequences of society being too tolerant.
The problem with the paradox of tolerance, (as I’ve seen it used) is people use it as an argument to justify putting limits on the principle which are in fact arbitrary and unjustified; they just say “we can’t tolerate the intolerant” as a cached excuse for doing violence to political enemies while still professing a belief in tolerance.
As such, your defence sounds to me like it’s ceding the ground. I don’t believe in tolerance-conditional-on-reciprocity, I believe in tolerance.

RowanE 8 Nov 2017 23:15 UTC
1 point
in reply to: curi’s comment on: Less Wrong Lacks Representatives and Paths Forward
Downvoting is not an argument because downvoting is a judgement that an idea is not worthy of “intellectually addressing” (on this forum). That’s not not addressing an idea.

RowanE 13 Sep 2017 19:00 UTC
29 points
in reply to: pepe_prime’s comment on: 2017 LessWrong Survey
I have taken the survey.

RowanE 2 Sep 2017 23:13 UTC
0 points
in reply to: whpearson’s comment on: Open thread, August 28 - September 3, 2017
That’s the reason she liked those things in the past, but “acheiving her goals” is redundant, she should have known years in advance about that, so it’s clear that she’s grown so attached to self-improvement that she sees it as an end in itself. Why else would anyone ever, upon deciding to look inside themselves instead of at expected utility, replace thoughts of paragliding in Jupiter with thoughts of piano lessons?

Hedonism isn’t bad, orgasmium is bad because it reduces the complexity of fun to maximising a single number.

I don’t want to be upgraded into a “capable agent” and then cast back into the wilderness from whence I came, I’d settle for a one-room apartment with food and internet before that, which as a NEET I can tell you is a long way down from Reedspacer’s Lower Bound.

RowanE 29 Aug 2017 11:18 UTC
0 points
in reply to: MattG2’s comment on: Open thread, August 28 - September 3, 2017
By believing it’s important enough that when you come up with a system of values, you label it a terminal one. You might find that you come up with those just by analysing the values you already have and identifying some as terminal goals, but “She had long been a believer in self-perfection and self-improvement” sounds like something one decides to care about.

RowanE 28 Aug 2017 22:00 UTC
2 points
in reply to: whpearson’s comment on: Open thread, August 28 - September 3, 2017
Serves her right for making self-improvement a foremost terminal value even when she knows that’s going to be rendered irrelevant, meanwhile the loop I’m stuck in is of the first six hours spent in my catgirl volcano lair.

RowanE 23 Dec 2016 13:15 UTC
11 points
on: Superintelligence: The Idea That Eats Smart People
Seems heavy on sneering at people worried about AI, light on rational argument. It’s almost like a rationalwiki article.

RowanE 21 Dec 2016 11:02 UTC
4 points
in reply to: Dagon’s comment on: Open thread, Dec. 19 - Dec. 25, 2016
I’ll add a datapoint to that and say an anonymous site like that is would tempt me enough to actively go and troll even though I’m not usually inclined towards trolling.

Although I picture it getting so immediately overwhelmed by trolls that the fun would disappear; “pissing in an ocean of piss” as 4chan calls it.

RowanE 13 Dec 2016 11:27 UTC
1 point
on: [Error communicating with LW2 server]
What is the value of this link supposed to be?

RowanE 11 Dec 2016 15:58 UTC
0 points
in reply to: Gunnar_Zarncke’s comment on: Take the Rationality Test to determine your rational thinking style
So, uh, are people honestly reporting that they got a “rationalist” result from this, or are they just thinking “well, I’m a rationalist, so...”?

RowanE 6 Dec 2016 10:23 UTC
0 points
in reply to: Bound_up’s comment on: If Atheists Had Faith
“Oh, that’s nice.”

They wouldn’t exactly be accepting the belief as equally valid; religious people already accept that people of other religions have a different faith than they do, and on at least some level they usually have to disagree with “other religions are just as valid as my own” to even call themselves believers of a particular religion, but it gets you to the point of agreeing to disagree.

RowanE 3 Dec 2016 19:29 UTC
1 point
on: If Atheists Had Faith
Since my comment was vague enough to be misunderstood, I’ll try to clarify what I thought the first time.

The dialogue reads as a comedy skit where the joke is “theists r dum”. The atheist states beliefs that are a parody of certain attitudes of religious believers, and then the theist goes along with an obvious setup they should see coming a mile away. It doesn’t seem any more plausible than the classic “rabbit season, duck season” exchange in Looney Tunes, so it’s not valuable.

RowanE 1 Dec 2016 13:30 UTC
0 points
in reply to: gwern’s comment on: Rationality Quotes September–December 2016
I think an overall decrease in activity on Less Wrong is to blame—“the death of Less Wrong” has been proclaimed for a while now. In which case, decreasing the frequency of the quotes thread seems like it would add to the downward spiral if it did anything at all.

RowanE 28 Nov 2016 15:28 UTC
1 point
on: Crowd sourcing a novel.
Don’t feel I have the attention span (and/or spoons) right now to actually look through the draft, but I note that you mis-spelled “embarrass” while talking about whether you’d embarrassed yourself, which I thought was kinda funny.

Um, not intending to mock, just coincidental placing of a typo I’m sure

RowanE 28 Nov 2016 8:59 UTC
1 point
on: If Atheists Had Faith
Believer: “I say it’s duck season, and I say fire!”

Yeah, I don’t see any real intellectual value to this.
What links here?
- RowanE's comment on If Atheists Had Faith by Bound_up (3 Dec 2016 19:29 UTC; 1 point)

RowanE 28 Nov 2016 8:54 UTC
4 points
in reply to: ingive’s comment on: Open thread, Nov. 28 - Dec. 04, 2016
The usual rule is to identify as an “aspiring rationalist”; identifying rationality as what you are can lead to believing you’re less prone to bias than you really are, while identifying it as what you aspire to reminds you to maintain constant vigilance.

RowanE 28 Nov 2016 8:24 UTC
0 points
in reply to: Jack_LaSota’s comment on: On calling inconceivable what you’ve already conceived.
I think I can conceive of things that are logically inconsistent. I might just be ignoring the details that make it inconsistent when I do, but other cases where I conceive of a concept but don’t keep every detail in mind at once don’t seem examples of inconceivability.

Wouldn’t the ability to have a false positive for a paradox itself be a sign that people can conceive of things that are paradoxical?

RowanE 27 Nov 2016 11:51 UTC
2 points
on: Seeking better name for “Effective Egoism”
I like “effective egoism” enough already, the alternatives I’ve seen suggested sound dumb and this one sounds snappy. It might not be perfect for communicating exactly the right message of what the idea is about, but you can do that by explaining, and having a cool name can only be achieved within the name itself.

RowanE 27 Nov 2016 11:22 UTC
0 points
on: On calling inconceivable what you’ve already conceived.
I don’t quite see the connection between the title and first sentence and the rest of the post you have there; logically inconsistent is not the same as inconceivable