Wasn’t visiting LessWrong with my profile for a long while.
Thank you for the detailed steps.
I suspect the down-vote is for the Taoist references where some LW’ers are heavily against references to Chi since they haven’t found substantial evidence for its existence.
For me, your post is a thumbs up: I appreciate the applicability of what you wrote.
Thank you!
Great guys!
How’d it go? Did you talk about a 2nd meeting?
I just lost a long response, because I was naive enough not to check if the “More Help” link in formatting was an in-tab link. It was. Hence a short answer (my self-allowed free-wheeling time is almost up)
First of all. Thank you for your more fulfilling answer.
First admission: In the bright light of hindsight I see that my reply was unnecessarily snide.
Second admission: Yes, I actually saw your first as being slightly noisy. Perhaps because the post on “Why Our Kind Can’t Cooperate” was so fresh in my mind. Your post fit very well into the self-sabotaging conducted by rationalists attempting communities that I perceived Eliezer to have described in that post.
Now I see that of course the interjection is valid. I just think our opinions differ on following points:
(1). The effectiveness of dancing and singing. Like you I’ve gone through quite a lot of years of mental gardening (around 7). With my current weed-out techniques, I do not think that the proposed exercises have an effect I couldn’t effectively undermine with ½-1 hour worth of auto-hypnosis. Hence my cost-benefit says (potentially) low cost and probable high benefit (low transaction cost of knowledge between me and rational-striving people who have tested approaches to subjects, or gained knowledge about subjects, I’m curious about, but have yet to explore myself).
(2). How profound the effect is. I’m obviously not a(n internet) network expert or I wouldn’t just have lost my entire post, but I wouldn’t liken dancing and singing together as root access. Nor as:
a cultural process that accepts everyone, and gets everyone to believe whatever is in everyone else’s heads at the beginning
More like opening a few ports perhaps (or allowing more bandwidth? - again I’m not nearly as tech-savvy as I have been, which means a lot less than most LW-members).
(3). Teaching creates more of a power division than a community feeling. Learning/exploring a new subject together, on the other hand, can be a quite powerful bond creation mechanism. My deepest bond of friendship has grown through learning a wide array of skills together and sharing insights on the way to the attainment of said skills.
(4). Your proposed ritual strikes me as being way more cultish than that of the post. The process mentioned strikes me as being very close to an initiation ritual. Furthermore: benevolence criteria is dubious: that means that we should agree on an ethical code (or at least points), which I’m not sure we do.
(5a). I do not personally consider it a minus to feel connected to strangers. Quite the opposite; my ethical position actually endorses that actively. Hence:
(5b). I’m slightly saddened by you likening a strong unity feeling to a parasitic disease.
PS. I tried reading the article on smallish groups (my best social structure for learning), but it was unfortunately a paid article and I’m not currently enjoying free access to the publication. If you have a way of enlightening me that does not require 35$ for me upfront, I’ll be more than willing to check it out.
PPS. When I format to use lines, is it normal that the formatting resets every number to one? IE: ” 1“ ” 2” became ” 1“ and ” 1”. I didn’t in the sandbox, and I didn’t immediately find something about it in the guide (and hence ran out of patience).
If the context loses the safety property, sing out of tune, miss the beat and do some negative association exercises. In other words I regard it as overtly cautious to fear a cult sensation before the community is even at a community level.
But for those of us that are risk-averse (which should be none of us, but probably is the majority): Do you know of any community building exercises that do not have a potential negative backlash?
[… or is our kind doomed to be one of a kind? insert ominous music of own choice]
Could you enlighten us with your preferred approach to meditation then? I’ve had very positive experiences just with simple breathing exercises, but I’d definitely like to improve.
I’d have a hard time presuming anyone to be completely rational. But I’d have an even harder time understanding why I shouldn’t point that out to someone who (presumably; due to them being here and all) wants to be more rational.
About your second point: I’m probably a bad choice for identifying your conformity filters due to the rather big amount of time I’ve spent at salsa and tango courses. Time which takes gargantuan proportions when contrasted to the awfully little time I’ve spent in Cthulhulian sects.
I disagree. Techniques for spreading rationality are highly rational to learn. Considering subjects such as Why Our Kind Can’t Cooperate I dare say that it’s almost essential for the project of disseminating rationality that LessWrong as a group learns how group dynamics work and how successful communities are built. If we consider being rational a good thing then we ought to make it as attractive as possible to feel as part of the rationalist group.
How is that rational?
a) I s’pose he does expect losses. Replenishing his ranks in the long term seems to be an acceptable idea (he is, more or less, immortal) b) Pity points? Perhaps the good guys held back against a pregnant woman? c) How long is she realistically out of the game, considering wet-nurses, time-turners and so on: half a year? d) If Bellatrix had gotten reckless, having a kid might have been a good way to rein her in a little bit..
… but honestly learning languages early on is a good investment for several other reasons. Not only for social and economical reasons, but also due to it becoming a lot harder to learn languages later on in life (please do correct me if this is a myth).
If you on the other hand stay learning languages during your youth, becoming fluent in a language takes less and less time (at least according to my own experience and that of all of the polyglots I know).
Also I’d say that being able to call on different aspects of your personality is a very valuable trait. If you combine the use of standard associations exercises (and hence have an above average control of your emotional state) with keying different associational patterns to different languages you’ll achieve a capacity for holistic problem solving and idea generation that I’d expect to be soaring high above the average levels.
if you can be kind and moderate in your personal behavior, you can get away with incredible amounts of institutionally-mediated violence and extremism, especially to anyone who feels like they “know” you. Hypothesis: the most dangerous people are those who can give us the illusion of “knowing” them while they command an institution whose internal operations we don’t see.
This suits extremely well with both local communities relationship to known criminals and to historical figures. Politics is a mind-killer and so on, but a lot of heroes of different nations have done some downright nasty stuff, but managed to keep their reputation due to perceptions about their personal manner. It has recently been used by leaders such as Chavez and Khomeini, but American presidents have also used this effect extensively (why kiss babies?) and historical figures from Cesar to Richard Lionheart and countless of medieval kings have also garnered good will by the actions they have undertaken in public while at the same time doing something in the opposite direction of way greater magnitude through their institutions of power.
My personal experience is that I’ve attached different parts of my personality to my different languages. I’m currently fluent in three and passable in two others. I notice that the part of my personality I attach to a given language depends on a variety of factors, but I can have a marked impact on it by focusing on my associations while learning the language. This is particularly true when I take the language from the classroom to an an experience of immersion.
In this regard I’ve also noticed that languages of the same root (for me: Danish, English and German) have a tendency to invoke related frames of minds whereas new language families (French, Arabic and Polish) allow me greater freedom in what kind of thoughts are likely to occupy my mind when I use them and hence what kind of person I am in this tongue. It’s worth noting that the Polish me is closer to the French me than both the Arabic and Danish parts. I suspect a likeliness in grammar and syntax to have played a role in this.
Now the funny thing is that I didn’t really notice this phenomena myself. While living in France I was visited by my parents. Both my dad (who was fluent in French) and my mum (who isn’t and wasn’t) noticed that everything from my tone of voice, to my subject matter to the way I gestured and moved changed when I changed between languages. American friends, independently, later made remarks in the same direction.
I must admit though that I haven’t tried it regarding decision making. It’s definitely worth a try and as it is, I’d predict that thinking in French will help me visualise a given situation, Danish would be preferred for extracting the emotional response, English for both estimating it’s likeliness of happening as well as turning the given situation into a joke whereas my Polish and Arabic are not quite yet at the same level of abstraction. I’m prone to being extremely flirtatious in Polish and my Arabic has a tendency to call on my altruistic and carefree sides.
Nope, pride definitely is more attractive for me due to the enhanced sense of curves. If this is supposed to proof something, I’d be highly suspicious of the results. I’m really bad a judging men, but I figure the pride one to be better there as well. The happy one seems to fake.
Yeah, but due to the politics is a mind-killer thing, we don’t really comment on it… just like a lot of other political hints are left alone (at least on my behalf) and I try to focus on making predictions and figuring out where the agents in this story will go given their apparent rationality (or lack thereof) and value sets. That’s the reason why I read this: it’s well-written entertainment I can use to train my ability to predict and phrase said predictions. Plus I like to see theories put to practice.
(upvoted chaosmosis) How is utilitarian not cold-blooded? As far as I understand, utilitarians work by assigning utility values between different outcomes and choosing the one with the most utility. That seems pretty cold-blooded.
100k years worth of life > 2 minutes of intense pain and loss of 2 years of life.
I’m confused. I’m curious.
Can you see his point of view?
Do you understand why people (me included) feel that you under-clarify your arguments?
Do you realise that we (me, and I guess thornblake as well) do not mean you any harm? That harming you could not possibly help us (sorry, it could, marginally so, if it actually had a behavioural impact)?
Furthermore, it is hard to get social benefits from downvoting, since others can’t see anyone downvote you. This does NOT have the same social effect as denouncing something in public.
I honestly didn’t know about the posting delay, but I personally wouldn’t assign a lot utility to it. And even less (close to none) to the ability to downvote others. In this case I think a 10 minute delay might help if it is used to check for illusion of transparency and/or lacking steps in his chain of reasoning.
But overall, thank you for pointing out the negative consequences of low karma. I’m reading up on it and I must admit I haven’t found the right post (read the faq) to cover all the consequences. Still they seem minor at best.
One major problem concerns the legal rights of magical criminals; what if you’re later found to be innocent? There’ll be no way to reclaim their magic. Hence I doubt Harry would prefer this solution.
Thank you!!! I know it’s been almost three years, but I’ve just discovered LessWrong (and my account) and highly appreciate your help.
I look forward to reading the article.