Waldheri

Karma: 50

Waldheri 3 May 2012 18:02 UTC
4 points
on: Rationality Quotes May 2012

All interpretation or observation of reality is necessarily fiction. In this case, the problem is that man is a moral animal abandoned in an amoral universe and condemned to a finite existence with no other purpose than to perpetuate the natural cycle of the species. It is impossible to survive in a prolonged state of reality, at least for a human being. We spend a good part of our lives dreaming, especially when we’re awake.

― Carlos Ruiz Zafón, The Angel’s Game

Waldheri 3 May 2012 17:57 UTC
16 points
in reply to: [deleted]’s comment on: Rationality Quotes May 2012
This reminds me of the following passage from We Need to Talk About Kevin by Lionel Shriver:

But keeping secrets is a discipline. I never use to think of myself as a good liar, but after having had some practice I had adopted the prevaricator’s credo that one doesn’t so much fabricate a lie as marry it. A successful lie cannot be brought into this world and capriciously abandoned; like any committed relationship it must be maintained, and with far more devotion than the truth, which carries on being carelessly true without any help. By contrast, my lie needed me as much as I needed it, and so demanded the constancy of wedlock: Till death do us part.

Waldheri 3 Apr 2011 14:13 UTC
0 points
in reply to: Richard_Kennaway’s comment on: Rationality quotes: April 2010
Counterfactual: the theory of evolution is one of the most successful scientific theories, yet it contains no equations; nor numbers. It is rather a framework of ideas in which observations can be made sense of.

Waldheri 5 Mar 2011 17:47 UTC
4 points
in reply to: MartinB’s comment on: Rationality Quotes: March 2011
Which in turn reminds me of The Onion news piece ‘Multiple Stab Wounds May Be Harmful To Monkeys’. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cQ7J7UjsRqg

Waldheri 5 Apr 2010 8:33 UTC
2 points
in reply to: AlexMennen’s comment on: Rationality quotes: April 2010
My initial response was to chuckle, but when my analytical capacities kicked in a moment later I was disappointed.

If his initial assumptions was that he was walking into a bar, does that make him atheist in this metaphor? Substitute “walked into a bar” by “believed there is a god”, the thing I assume it is a metaphor of. You will see it makes no sense.

Waldheri 10 Mar 2010 21:42 UTC
0 points
in reply to: Psy-Kosh’s comment on: Rationality quotes: March 2010
How do I decode this?

Waldheri 2 Mar 2010 8:19 UTC
6 points
in reply to: Cyan’s comment on: Rationality quotes: March 2010
I highly recommend anyone interested in hard sci-fi to read Blindsight.

Waldheri 2 Feb 2010 20:33 UTC
8 points
on: The AI in a box boxes you
On a not so much related, but equally interesting hypothetical note of naughty AI: consider the situation that AIs aren’t passing the Turing Test, not because they are not good enough, but because they are failing it on purpose.

I’m pretty sure I remember this from the book River of Gods by Ian McDonald.

Waldheri 30 Jan 2010 21:34 UTC
3 points
in reply to: nerzhin’s comment on: Logical Rudeness
Though I appreciate the fun, you are forgetting that this is a solution to a problem that lies in old-fashioned rudeness of interrupting one another, something quite impossible on a turn-based medium as this.

On a different note, some people may be distracted too much by the ice cream, and the goal of making them listen might be forgone because of this.

Waldheri 19 Jan 2010 17:24 UTC
4 points
in reply to: ChristianKl’s comment on: Advancing Certainty
Isn’t “intuition” in that case not simply subconscious empirical knowledge?

Waldheri 16 Feb 2009 9:55 UTC
1 point
on: An Especially Elegant Evpsych Experiment
Thanks for the response, HH.

I partly agree with Bruce K britton—surely one can find a curve that corresponds with the results from this grief study. It may very well coincide with a curve describing the relationship between the age and production of enzyme X in bacterium Y.

The question is: Why did the researchers decide to compare it to the reproductive potential curve? Were there other clues that suggested a relationship between the two?

Waldheri 15 Feb 2009 21:21 UTC
2 points
on: An Especially Elegant Evpsych Experiment
I wonder… How does one measure grief?