“Please don’t hold anything back, and give me the facts” – Wen Jiabao, Chinese Premier (when meeting disgruntled people at the central complaints offices).
sfb
Karma: 443
Yes, ok.
I was thinking of a group more like “you said your piano teacher suggested practising with a metronome—have you actually done so this week?”
“you’ve said a priority is learning the piano, yet you aren’t keeping track of your practise or recording yourself or making any way to check your progress and get feedback. Have you noticed that is inconsistent with your stated desire?”
“Do you realise how much you are talking about your commute to work compared to it’s real impact on your life?”
not
“you really suck at the piano”
“and have you noticed how stupid you are?”
“and how you talk forever about boring things?”
I tend to find focussing on developing strengths to better than focussing on weaknesses.
I don’t follow. If you never focus on things you can’t do well, you’ll never do anything different or build any new abilities.
Piano teacher: You’re not keeping time very well, you could benefit from practising playing to a metronome.
wedrifid: I prefer to focus on developing strengths, and I’m really good at playing loudly so I’ll just do that, thanks.
?
Makes me wonder if a good way to deal with rationality or akrasia or self-improvement would be the kind of support group where everyone tries to find fault with everyone else. It’s so easy to see flaws in others compared to flaws in ourselves, why not use that to our advantage?
Finding the right people to do this who could both handle it and keep it from turning into an insult trading group might be difficult.
Suggested edits for an audience made of stereotypical LessWrongniks:
It’s business as usual for a bartender, and one day as he is cleaning his bar an unusual customer walks in dressed in an expensive suit, a beautiful supermodel hanging off each arm and with a limo parked outside. Furthermore, the man has an orange for a head.
The bartender assigns high probability that the man is dressed in a costume of some sort, pretty low probability that he is hallucinating given that nothing else appears odd, low to medium probability that the talking orange-lookalike is a robot creation with a radio link to a real person elsewhere, and negligible probability that his whole understanding of the universe is wrong to the level that genies, magic and talking conscious fruit with biological connections to a human nervous system exists.
He greets the man and serves him a drink.
Alternate middle: “For my first wish I asked for an unlimited fortune. The genie became very quiet and after a minute or two, coins started appearing beside it. Then more and more, I saw the ground, the grass, rocks, all start morphing into coins more and more of them. I pocketed some and ran.
He looks around. “I hope it’s not still going”, he said with nervous laughter.
Is it established that most would?
Would you be happy to classify that wasp as having “superhuman intelligence”?
Then why accept that a machine which behaves like that wasp is superhumanly intelligent?
See also this bit relating to Christmas Cracker bad jokes:
He [Professor Richard Wiseman] thinks the key to the success of modern cracker jokes is precisely because they’re not funny. ‘If the joke is good and you tell it and it doesn’t get a laugh, it’s your problem. If the joke’s bad and it doesn’t get a laugh, then it’s the joke’s problem. My theory is that it’s a way of not embarrassing people at Christmas.’ So they’re not jokes at all? ‘In a sense, they’re just a way of binding people together. Given the diversity around your average dinner table, it would be extraordinarily difficult to come up with a joke that everyone found funny. The kids won’t get it, or someone will find it offensive. Even if you did, the delivery would be difficult. Women don’t tell jokes to one another, so they’re not used to doing it. Blokes do, but it’s done in a particular context, not around the family table, and it’s quite stressful to try and deliver a funny joke, so it would be a disaster.’
Summary: “A man has an orange for a head. How? Magic.”
Is it still funny?
Assuming a person can actually have an orange for a head and that genies exist then this is just a straightforward story explaining how he became wealthy, desirable and fruitheaded. Like asking someone in a suit how come he’s wearing a suit and he answers “because I bought one and put it on”.
Assuming a person can’t actually have an orange for a head, it’s just a timewasting surreal story which doesn’t go anywhere.
The humour is in the non-answer where an answer is expected, but I don’t find a non-answer funny. I do see it as a joke-shaped pattern and start to involuntarily smile at it, but I’m mentally annoyed by it not enhappied by it.
Your post seems to imply that I could fix the problem by unimagining these agents. If that’s what you mean, I’m a bit insulted
Not “could” in the sense that it’s an ability you have but choose not to use, nor in the sense that you could “if you were a better person”, nor in the sense that your illness is imaginary.
Only ‘could’ in the narrow literal sense that it answers the question “how could neutral modify their behaviour without their cooperation?”—if you aren’t really three entities and “you” are the greater whole then you ‘could’ ignore their lack of cooperation and alter their behaviour by fiat. (Whether you actually could in real life, or if it would be helpful to do so, is another matter).
rest of reply
Interesting. Thank you.
How do you imagine something can spend the rest of eternity counting in an endless while (true) { i++; } loop and yet still refer to it as a superhuman intelligence?
I know people here take a dim view of humans, but that’s just ridiculous.
How can Neutral modify their behavior if they won’t cooperate?
Do they exist as distinct entities or are they ideas? Neutral can unimagine them. Or, rather, you can unimagine all of them. Dictate them out of your head.
Are you actually three agents? Have you tried being four agents or two? Does that make sense as a question to ask?
Have you tried any other treatment for depression as depression, not as bipolar disorder—e.g. cognitive behavioural therapy?
I don’t have faith that Depressed is sincere
Who doesn’t have faith that Depressed is sincere?
I do not know of any case where someone has said that they “should have known better” after making a false positive, say, “I knew I shouldn’t have used the seat belt on the buss, we did not crash after all”.
Possibly the phrase “I needn’t have bothered [..] after all”? e.g.:
Your place is delightfully homely and very tastefully decorated with a kitchen that was so well equipped with quality cooking implements that I needn’t have bothered bringing my own!
It’s not directly saying they should have known, but it is saying they judged so inaccurately that reality took them by surprise so much it was worth commenting on.
Also the phrase “I don’t know what we were worried about” fits a similar template—not a scolding for not knowing, like “should have known” is, but yes an admission of feeling overprepared for something which didn’t happen and now questioning the reasons they had earlier.
and frankly their status deserves a penalty
?
I suspect incompetence combined with self-righteousness
Lack of ability combined with wanting to be right? Two things normal people never exhibit which deserve punishment?
Would demonstrating the self-righteousness count as ad hominem?
Would it count as useful? Would it help?
Admittedly, almost no one who is attracted by discussion of sports and celebrity meets community standards for rationality, most of us would find it difficult to include such references
I don’t know … there are plenty of references to people in comments in the style of celebrity fawning, just that they are niche celebrities instead of mainstream ones.
See this summary of rationality quotes—has fantasy author Terry Pratchett really said more rational quotable things than Einstein, Darwin, Descartes, Dennett, Jaynes, Aristotle and Sagan? Or is it just that people like him more?
Well, sort the same list [by karma votes] instead of number of quotes, and Pratchett moves up from 4th to 2nd.
That seems like either evidence that Pratchett and his fictional worlds have more relevance to rationality than the opening post wants to accept, or evidence that Pratchett is treated as a bit of a celebrity around here and your suggestion that people find it hard to throw in celebrity references isn’t quite right, it’s throwing in the right kind of celebrity references for people who celebrate vastly different properties in people which is hard.
And here I was thinking it was obscure mathematical gibberish that would discourage non-nerdy people from participating. Instead it’s mentioning an idea by a famous author that’s scaring them off.
;-)
Has that check helped you?
Whether someone learns advanced piano from a book must be at least as much down to whether they know intermediate piano up to the level the book starts at, as to whether the book is a good guide to advanced piano.
But those divisions of ability and knowledge are even less agreed on in self-help, so matching up where you “are” with a book is less easy, and whether someone else matched with any given book might not be of any real help at all.
A premature really powerful Optimization Process is the root of all future evil.