SpectrumDT

• SpectrumDTDec 13, 2024, 9:13 AM

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  in reply to: Logan Riggs’s comment on: Self-In­tegrity and the Drown­ing Child

  Evidently you think your niece is worth more than half a sandwich.

• SpectrumDTDec 13, 2024, 8:53 AM

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  in reply to: abramdemski’s comment on: Are most peo­ple deeply con­fused about “love”, or am I miss­ing a hu­man uni­ver­sal?

  I do personally feel that there is some emotional core to love, so I’m sympathetic to the “it’s a specific emotion” definition.

  The definition of love as an emotion seems wrong to me, because emotions are short-lived. Intuitively, we think of statements like “I love my son” as being true all the time. But I do not experience an emotion of “love” towards him all the time. When I am away from him, hours can pass where I do not think of him at all, and when I am with him I sometimes feel an emotion of annoyance rather than “love”.

  So this kind of definition does not seem to match how people use the concept.

• SpectrumDTDec 3, 2024, 1:21 PM

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  in reply to: aphyer’s comment on: Univer­sal Ba­sic In­come and Poverty

  I think the overwhelming majority of people in the US who are ‘working 60-hour weeks, at jobs where they have to smile and bear it when their bosses abuse them’ are also consuming large amounts of luxuries, and I think it’s reasonable to conceptualize this as ‘they are working longer hours than they have to in order to consume lots of luxuries’.

  May I ask you two questions?

  1. Can you please list several things that you consider luxuries and which you believe these “poor” people spend a lot of money on?

  2. What evidence (and how much) do you base this on?

• SpectrumDTDec 2, 2024, 12:12 PM

  3 points

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  in reply to: DaystarEld’s comment on: You are not too “ir­ra­tional” to know your prefer­ences.

  Yes. Thanks. Good explanation.

• SpectrumDTNov 29, 2024, 1:01 PM

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  in reply to: eukaryote’s comment on: You are not too “ir­ra­tional” to know your prefer­ences.

  which sucks incredibly and is bad.

  Your wording here makes me curious: Are you saying the same thing twice here, or are you saying two different things? Does the phrase “X sucks” mean the same thing to you as “X is bad”, or is there a distinction?

• SpectrumDTNov 29, 2024, 12:57 PM

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  in reply to: Jan_Kulveit’s comment on: You are not too “ir­ra­tional” to know your prefer­ences.

  Realizing that your preferences can and do develop obviously opens the Pandora’s box of actions which do change preferences.^[1] The ability to do that breaks orthogonality.

  Could you please elaborate on how this “breaks orthogonality”? It is unclear to me what you think the ramifications of this are.

• SpectrumDTNov 29, 2024, 12:55 PM

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  on: You are not too “ir­ra­tional” to know your prefer­ences.

  And sometimes communities do in fact have explicit “preferences” that will cost people status just by having different ones. It might even be costly to find out what those diffuse preferences are, and especially daunting for people new to a community.

  Could you please give some examples of this? It is unclear to me what kind of things you are talking about here.

• SpectrumDTNov 28, 2024, 9:37 AM

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  in reply to: Jay’s comment on: Hell is wasted on the evil

  or you don’t really know yourself well

  Why do you think that?

• SpectrumDTNov 28, 2024, 9:37 AM

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  in reply to: abramdemski’s comment on: Hell is wasted on the evil

  What I mean is that the distribution has a crazy variance (possibly no finite variance); take two “opportunities to do good” and compare them to each other, and an orders-of-magnitude difference is not rare.

  Do you mean the differences between the expected utility upfront? Or do you mean the differences between the actual utility in the end (which the actor might have no way to accurately predict in advance)?

[Question] Does the “an­cient wis­dom” ar­gu­ment have any val­idity? If a par­tic­u­lar teach­ing or tra­di­tion is old, to what ex­tent does this make it more trust­wor­thy?

[Question] What are the effec­tive util­i­tar­ian pros and cons of hav­ing chil­dren (in rich coun­tries)?

• SpectrumDTAug 28, 2024, 12:28 PM

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  in reply to: AnthonyC’s comment on: How great is the util­ity of “sav­ing” en­dan­gered lan­guages?

  I also think that in any kind of complex system, monocultures are fragile.

  This is a valid point. But the world is far from a monoculture. Even if all currently endangered languages die out, we will have plenty of cultures left.

  If the world ends up with less than, say, 100 languages, then I agree it starts to make sense to preserve them. As it stands now, I think we have more than enough cultural diversity, and keeping tiny minority languages and cultures alive is not worth the opportunity cost.

• SpectrumDTAug 27, 2024, 8:10 AM

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  in reply to: AnthonyC’s comment on: How great is the util­ity of “sav­ing” en­dan­gered lan­guages?

  It can be too slow to catch up to rapid change, but then in that case one of the things you want is a diversity of cultures for selection to act on.

  Is this the problem that you are trying to solve by preserving cultures? Make the human race as a whole more resilient in the face of rapid change?

  Is this really the reason why you think culture is important? Or is it a rationalization?

  I am skeptical for two reasons:

  1. Your argument about rapid change seems extremely different from your argument in the grandparent post where you talked about literature and philosophy, Aristotle and Chaucer.

  2. Do you think that preserving a bunch of tiny cultures of a few hundred people (many of whom probably live in poverty) is really going to help make the human race more resilient in the face of rapid change?

• SpectrumDTAug 22, 2024, 1:25 PM

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  in reply to: Richard_Kennaway’s comment on: How great is the util­ity of “sav­ing” en­dan­gered lan­guages?

  In those words it sounds like a bad thing, but look past the words and is it, really?

  In my opinion, yes. That is why I posted the question.

• SpectrumDTAug 22, 2024, 1:24 PM

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  in reply to: AnthonyC’s comment on: How great is the util­ity of “sav­ing” en­dan­gered lan­guages?

  Why is culture so important, again?

• SpectrumDTAug 22, 2024, 1:18 PM

  7 points

  5

  in reply to: David Gross’s comment on: How great is the util­ity of “sav­ing” en­dan­gered lan­guages?

  I agree that the utility of preserving endangered languages is greater than zero. But how much greater.

  These alternative ways of conceptualizing… how useful are they? What can we achieve with them? As far as I can tell, they are fun and interesting, but insignificant compared to other problems we can help solve.

• SpectrumDTAug 21, 2024, 8:08 AM

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  in reply to: mad’s comment on: How great is the util­ity of “sav­ing” en­dan­gered lan­guages?

  Preservation of endangered languages involves raising children bilingually in the majority and endangered language...

  Generally speaking, endangered languages are from a cultural minority and members of that minority culture enjoy being able to speak that language.

  If the minority cultures can fix the problem themselves by teaching their children, great! Far be it from me to stop them from that. And of course the dominant cultures should not actively oppress minority languages.

  But when outsiders are expected to put in extra effort to preserve minority languages—that is when I balk.

  Imagine if english went extinct. In a sense, we’d lose Chaucer, Shakespeare, Austen, Steinbeck. … These “endangered” languages had culture too—songs and stories, maybe books and plays. That’s important.

  Important, sure. But other things are much more important, such as eradicating diseases and getting people basic education and preserving the environment.

  If I had the choice between saving just one (decent quality) human life and keeping an endangered language alive for another generation, I would sacrifice the language to save the human.

• SpectrumDTAug 21, 2024, 8:02 AM

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  in reply to: mad’s comment on: How great is the util­ity of “sav­ing” en­dan­gered lan­guages?

  I was talking specifically about childhood language acquisition, where learning a new language doesn’t require you to forgo reading tvtropes or watching buffy the vampire slayer, it’s just part of your background acquisition the same way that children learn how gravity works and how to manipulate small objects as they grow up.

  It maybe easy for the child, but it can take a lot of effort and energy from the parents.

  I am the father of a sort-of bilingual child. I am Danish and we live in Denmark, but my wife is Chinese. Our 4-year-old son speaks good Danish, but his Chinese is very weak. My wife tries on-and-off to insist on speaking Chinese to him, but it is a struggle because he does not like it. So it is hard work for her, and she often does not have the energy and falls back to speaking Danish to him.

  I speak nary a word Chinese. I could of course study Chinese so I could contribute, but that would be a huge effort.

• SpectrumDTAug 21, 2024, 7:49 AM

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  in reply to: Dagon’s comment on: How great is the util­ity of “sav­ing” en­dan­gered lan­guages?

  To me this sound suspiciously like the “Fallacy of Grey”.

  The Sophisticate: “The world isn’t black and white. No one does pure good or pure bad. It’s all gray. Therefore, no one is better than anyone else.”

  The Zetet: “Knowing only gray, you conclude that all grays are the same shade. You mock the simplicity of the two-color view, yet you replace it with a one-color view . . .”

  https://​​www.lesswrong.com/​​posts/​​dLJv2CoRCgeC2mPgj/​​the-fallacy-of-gray

[Question] How great is the util­ity of “sav­ing” en­dan­gered lan­guages?