You’re right, cake would have been more appropriate. :) (Except I love pie way more.)
smk
Karma: 322
Well, people usually enjoy yummy food even if they have no, uh… co-eating attraction? to the person they’re eating it with. Something like “co-eating attraction” could exist, maybe there are people out there who have that, where they experience an arousal of their gustatory desires in response to another person, but I don’t think that’s typical. (I hope it’s clear that what I’m talking about is different from the quite common phenomenon of food being more enjoyable when other factors, such as the company, ambiance, etc. are also enjoyable.)
Sexual attraction, on the other hand, is a common thing, and people’s enjoyment of sex is often strongly related to their attraction to the person they’re having sex with. Of course, it’s also possible for some people to enjoy sex without being at all attracted to the person they’re having sex with, but that’s not the typical scenario, is it? If I tried really hard for a long time, maybe I could learn to enjoy sex with a woman despite being exclusively androsexual, but I’m not at all confident that I could.
So yes, sex can be non-attractional like pie, but it’s more commonly thought of as being strongly attractional. It’s that attraction part that my weirdtopia doesn’t have. People in my weirdtopia could still enjoy sex, but why would they when they’ve got pie, I mean wire-heading?
My sexual weirdtopia is that the majority of people self-modify (using some sort of technology) to eliminate their sexual attractions and romantic attractions. They still feel other kinds of love and affection, and they still desire closeness with others. They might choose to enjoy pleasures* as intense as sex together with someone they love, but it’s more like people eating delicious pie together; it’s not driven by attraction. Sexual and romantic love only remain to a minority of people who chose not to follow the trend.
(*Intense pleasures delivered via a little light wire-heading, perhaps, but not to the level that would cause you to ignore the rest of life.)
It seems to me that you need to do more than just prefer immortality for all. Harry’s happy thought is not just that he wants people to stop dying, but that he has a great deal of hope—confidence, even—that it will happen, one day.
Sometimes players like to feel they’ve stymied the DM, for instance by using a loophole to bypass a whole series of obstacles and jump straight to the win. As DM I would sometimes set up situations like that, hoping that they would think of the loophole, and then acting all chagrined when they did. :) But of course the win came with complications of its own, which led to the main plot I was actually trying to get to. (Or if they don’t win, I’d have another way to get them there.) Anyway, the point is that it can be fun for the players to feel like they have a big impact on the plot. And hey, sometimes they actually do—players going off on tangents has led to some really cool plots that I had not planned for. Like when my plan was for them to defeat some druglords, but the swordmage decided to get addicted to the drug instead.
Some strangely common childhood beliefs:
Everyone except you is a robot
Your life is like the Truman Show
In the “Probability” section, you say:
Suppose you start out 85% confident that the one remaining enemy soldier is not a sniper. That leaves only 15% credence to the hypothesis that he is a sniper.
But in the next section, “The Problem of Priors”, you say:
In the example above where you’re a soldier in combat, I gave you your starting probabilities: 85% confidence that the enemy soldier was a sniper, and 15% confidence he was not.
Seems like you swapped the numbers.
Potential scenarios:
1: Alfred and Bob really do support the same agenda, but Alfred thinks Bob’s tone makes him unpersuasive.
Alfred pretends to support Bob’s agenda, but is just a concern troll.
Alfred is open about disagreeing with Bob’s agenda, and directs his criticisms at Bob’s tone rather than engaging with Bob’s actual argument.
I interpret the opening sentence of that page as referring to scenarios 2 and 3, in that order:
sometimes by Concern trolls and sometimes as a Derailment
Here’s some more stuff from that page which seems to describe scenario 3:
If you tread on someone’s toes, and they tell you to get off, then get off their toes. Don’t tell them to “ask nicely”.
And:
some men label any feminist thought or speech as hostile or impolite
On that page I don’t see much reference to scenario 1, which is what you seem to be talking about.
In my experience scenarios 2 and 3 are where tone arguments most often come up and are objected to.
HonoreDB created a way to embed polls here instead of using karma.
The scenario being imagined supposes that you and I both support the same agenda
That’s not the scenario in which I have most often seen people objecting to tone arguments.
I would guess so, yes. Not wildly unusual, but kinda, yeah. My perception might be skewed because I’m unusual in the other direction. You seem like one of those extra un-picky people, while I am extra picky.
It’s pretty cool that you are
a friendship slutplatonically promiscuousless likely than average to reject someone approaching you for affection. Advertising this might reduce your status, but you’ll probably get more hugs overall. I say, go ahead and publicly spell out your unusual openness (by telling people your rules, etc).
Maybe they meant that it doesn’t continue getting less and less good. I dunno.
I was going to reply to you about the feasibility of weight loss in general (you haven’t said you’re interested in weight loss, but that’s what people usually do Atkins for), but my comment really wasn’t answering your question, so I posted in the open thread instead. Here it is if you’re interested.
I tried to tell my husband about murder-Gandhi but I was laughing too hard.
Liron’s post about the Atkins Diet got me thinking. I’d often heard that the vast majority of people who try to lose weight end up regaining most of it after 5 years, making permanent weight loss an extremely unlikely thing to succeed at. I checked out a few papers on the subject, but I’m not good at reading studies, so it would be great to get some help if any of you are interested. Here are the links (to pdfs) with a few notes. Anyone want to tell me if these papers really show what they say they do? Or at any rate, what do you think about the feasibility of permanent weight loss?
Medicare’s search for effective obesity treatments: Diets are not the answer.
Mann, Traci; Tomiyama, A Janet; Westling, Erika; Lew, Ann-Marie; Samuels, Barbra; Chatman, Jason
American Psychologist, Vol 62(3), Apr 2007, 220-233.
”In sum, the potential benefits of dieting on long-term weight outcomes are minimal, the potential benefits of dieting on long-term health outcomes are not clearly or consistently demonstrated, and the potential harms of weight cycling, although not definitively demonstrated, are a clear source of concern.”Meta-analysis: the effect of dietary counseling for weight loss.
Dansinger, ML; Tatsioni, A; Wong, JB; Chung, M; Balk, EM
Annals of Internal Medicine, 2007;147:41-50.
”All methods indicated that weight loss continued for approximately 6 to 12 months during the active phase of counseling and that participants steadily regained weight during the maintenance phase.”
This meta-analysis did not include any low-carb diets, though it did mention a different analysis which did.Dietary Therapy for Obesity: An Emperor With No Clothes.
Mark, Allyn L
Hypertension, 2008; 51: 1426-1434.
”Over 5 decades, it has been demonstrated repeatedly that dietary therapy fails to achieve weight loss maintenance.”
This paper talks a lot about leptin.Long-term weight-loss maintenance: a meta-analysis of US studies
Anderson, James W; Konz, Elizabeth C; Frederich, Robert C; Wood, Constance L
The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, November 2001; vol. 74 no. 5:579-584.
”Five years after completing structured weight-loss programs, the average individual maintained a weight loss of >3 kg and a reduced weight of > 3% of initial body weight.”
This is the most optimistic one. It compares VLEDs (very low energy diets) to HBDs (hypoenergetic balanced diets) and concludes that VLEDS are significantly better. After an average of 4.5 years, those who used VLEDs were still an average of 15.5 lbs lighter than their initial weight, while those who used HBDs were an average of 4.4 lbs lighter than initially.
I don’t think the OP said they wanted to be top priority for all their partners.
I suppose that’s why pnrjulius put “utility function” in quotes.
do you think anyone would complain about actual people smelling gender-inappropriately?
I’ve never heard anyone complain about someone else’s scent being gender-nonconforming, but I have noticed a few men being careful that their own scented products conform. Not that often, though. Actually it’s more common in my experience for people to worry that someone else (like, someone they’re buying a gift for) won’t want to wear other-gender-associated scents. For example, my mother-in-law gave us some floral-scented fabric softener while implying that my husband might not like it used on his clothes (in fact he likes it).
In the absence of other evidence, could you not use some sort of complexity measure to estimate that, if our universe is being simulated, the simulating universe is more likely to have simpler laws than more complex ones? (And maybe even that having no simulating universe—meaning our universe is not a simulation—is even simpler, and therefore more likely?) But I have no idea what the actual difference in probabilities would be, if you could.