jsalvatier

“PR” is corrosive; “reputation” is not.

It's like virtue and reputation ("honor") were one thing at the time, and now they're two things.

I almost wonder if the problem is less "people stopped caring about being truly-intrinsically-virtuous" and more: People stopped rationalizing their reputation-management as virtuous; which fed into a "it's impractical and uncouth to care about virtue" cycle; which resulted in people having too many degrees of freedom, because it's easier to rationalize arbitrary actions as practical than to rationalize arbitrary actions as virtuous.

Yeah, I was having similar thoughts.

Replying to“PR” is corrosive; “reputation” is not.

“PR” is corrosive; “reputation” is not.

That's a good point. Reputation is less naturally spiritual. I think you can experience it both ways. Imagine someone who thinks about reputation as painted on their heart. Versus someone who is is fine with trying to manipulate their reputation.

Replying to“PR” is corrosive; “reputation” is not.

“PR” is corrosive; “reputation” is not.

Modernity has made people quite averse to talking about and dealing with spirituality. I think maybe a big part of what's going on is that while PR is a material concept, honor is a spiritual concept. It deals with meaning directly rather than only indirectly. Honor matters for its own sake (or can), matters to your soul. Whereas PR can only ever matter indirectly, only as a consequence of other things. No one has PR in their soul.

That would mean that people end up avoiding thinking about and relating to things like honor and reputation because it just feels weird. It feel like the sort of thing that you're not supposed to deal with. It feels like something that science and technology have vaguely disproven.

>Thus, I think that the process is relatively reliable but not totally reliable.

Absolutely. That's exactly right.

>My Christian friend claimed that atheists/rationalists/skeptics/evolutionists cannot trust even their own reason (beacuse it is the product of their imperfect brains in their opinion).

It sounds like there's a conflation between 'trust' and 'absolute trust'. Clearly we have some useful notion of trust because we can navigate potentially dangerous situations relatively safely. So using plain language its false to say that atheists can't trust their own judgement. Clearly they can in some situations. Are you saying atheists can't climb a ladder safely?

It sounds like he wants something to trust in absolutely. Has he faced the possibility that that might just not exist?

Consider how justified trust can come into existence.

You're traveling through the forest. You come to moldy looking bridge over a ravine. It looks a little sketchy. So naturally you feel distrustful of the bridge at first. So you look at it from different angles, and shake it a bit. And put a bit of weight on it. And eventually, some deep unconscious part of you will decide that it's either untrustworthy and you'll find another route, or it will decide its trustworthy and you'll cross the bridge.

We don't understand that process, but its reliable anyway.

Thanks, I forgot to make it clear I'm looking for digital versions.

I'm making an online museum of ethos (my ethos). I'm using good and bad art and commentary to make my ethos very visible through aesthetics.

jsalvatier5y*

I am doing an art criticism project that’s very important to me, and I’m looking for high res digital versions the art in the following books.

Help with getting these via a university library, or pointers to where I could buy an electronic copy of any of these is much appreciated.

Where do (did?) stable, cooperative institutions come from?

If it’s worth saying, but not worth its own post, here's a place to put it.

If you are new to LessWrong, here's the place to introduce yourself. Personal stories, anecdotes, or just general comments on how you found us and what you hope to get from the site and community are invited. This is also the place to discuss feature requests and other ideas you have for the site, if you don't want to write a full top-level post.

If you want to explore the community more, I recommend reading the Library, checking recent Curated posts, seeing if there are any meetups in your area, and checking out the Getting Started section of the LessWrong FAQ. If you want to orient to the content on the site, you can also check out the new Concepts section.

The Open Thread tag is here. The Open Thread sequence is here.

Replying toWhere do (did?) stable, cooperative institutions come from?

jsalvatierNov 04, 2020

Attempting to blindsight the answer:

In the past I imagine that people were usually trying to 'be a serious person'. And that's still true. But somehow being a serious person is now faker. And I think maybe its because they're being a very scared serious person. Somehow they're a lot more vulnerable from every direction. Or there's a lot more directions they're vulnerable from.

LessWrong Help Desk - free paper downloads and more (2014)

[Link] New prize on causality in statistics education

12y

Over the last year, VincentYu, gwern and others have provided many papers for the LessWrong community (87% success rate in 2012) through previous help desk threads. We originally intended to provide editing, research and general troubleshooting help, but article downloads are by far the most requested service.

If you're doing a LessWrong relevant project we want to help you. If you need help accessing a journal article or academic book chapter, we can get it for you. If you need some research or writing help, we can help there too.

Turnaround times for articles published in the last 20 years or so is usually less than a day. Older articles often take a couple days.

Please... (read more)

335

What are you working on? December 2012

13y

"[Judea] Pearl is setting up a contest to help advance the teaching of causal inference in introductory statistics courses" (link).

Meetup : Seattle Meetup: Bayes Theorem Tutorial

13y

This is the sixth bimonthly 'What are you working On?' thread. Previous threads are here. So here's the question:

What are you working on?

Here are some guidelines:

Focus on projects that you have recently made progress on, not projects that you're thinking about doing but haven't started.
Why this project and not others? Mention reasons why you're doing the project and/or why others should contribute to your project (if applicable).
Talk about your goals for the project.
Any kind of project is fair game: personal improvement, research project, art project, whatever.
Link to your work if it's linkable.

How well defined is ADHD?

13y

Discussion article for the meetup : Seattle Meetup: Bayes Theorem Tutorial

WHEN: 02 December 2012 04:00:00PM (-0800)

WHERE: 1900 NE 68th St. Seattle, WA 98115

This Sunday Brendan will be giving a tutorial on Bayes theorem at the Ravenna House. I understand there will be a couple different explanations and some practice problems.

Normal socializing and dinner to follow.

As a follow up to Brendan's tutorial, next week I will be give a non-technical introduction to thinking with statistical models. In particular, the usefulness of Hierarchical Models and other Hidden Variable models.

Discussion article for the meetup : Seattle Meetup: Bayes Theorem Tutorial