Nemoto
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Nemoto has not written any posts yet.
Nemoto has not written any posts yet.
There actually are rising cases of "mental ill-health" right now. Here in the UK, services are swamped. I'm sure some of this is due to an attitude change, in that people now refer to anything from a minor upset, or a slight difference in neurological function, to normal emotions such as grief, shame and regret, as a mental illness.
Previously the attitude in the post-war generation was more like Truman's toward Oppenheimer: “Blood on his hands; damn it, he hasn’t half as much blood on his hands as I have. You just don’t go around bellyaching about it”. (Robert Oppenheimer: A Life Inside the Center; by Ray Monk.)
Bellyaching, cutting people out of one's... (read more)
People can stand what is true,
for they are already enduring it.
Some people are already enduring it, whatever it is. The most recent figure I can find for suicides in the UK from the Office for National Statistics is from 2023:
There were 6,069 suicides registered in England and Wales (11.4 deaths per 100,000 people) in 2023; this is an increase compared with 2022 (10.7 deaths per 100,000, or 5,642 deaths) and the highest rate seen since 1999.
Maybe some of these por souls found their lives so unbearable because of their false beliefs. But it is flippant to assume that people can, in fact, endure the truth. Some truths are unbearable to some people.
Maybe... (read more)
What would you do if she replied,"My concept of God is a pantheistic one based on the all-pervading and so far unexplained zero-point energy, without which the Universe would not exist. It may or may not be intelligent, but so far it does appear to meet the criteria of immortal, invisible, and omnipresent"?
We say hi to each other regularly now. His name is George.
Isn't it extraordinary to know the name of a homeless person? Unusual enough to make it the concluding point of a section of writing on LessWrong. After all, they are almost a separate species, with their own culture, way of life, habits, and an aura which causes a nostril-wrinkling response in any decent clean-living human. Why should upright citizens have to fund the needs of this feckless lot of wasters?
Except his name is George. He has a personality. He once had parents, maybe a school, maybe hopes and dreams. He is not detritus, but a person. Something terrible has gone wrong... (read 516 more words →)
Less Wrong is all about rationality, which is a vital component of our thinking, but there is evidence to suspect our brains have useful functions beyond this. For example, the placebo and nocebo effects, which demonstrate the physical results of our positive or negative beliefs. Because of this it is necessary to do double blind trials on medicines, so that not even the person administering the treatment knows who is receiving the trial drug and who is getting the sugar pill. There is the "white coat effect" which causes raised blood pressure due to being in a medical setting. These products of our minds are not rational, but they may be useful,... (read 648 more words →)
Ah, maybe I am too new for more than one vote, because holding down doesn't do it.
A lesson for humans as the population continues to increase.
Thank you for being so kind. I want to give 2 karma, but it won't let me.
Your graph also illustrates perfectly why I find this an example of semistable equilibrium as explained in this article. It even looks like a cliff face, although it is inverted. There is a point at which the lag phase changes and becomes the exponential phase. As long as the correct action is taken before this point, the exponential phase can be avoided; e.g. take the petri dish out of the incubator and put bleach in it. This would be equivalent to the chicken player stopping his car before the cliff edge.
Of course, any opinion of mine is going to seem naive, maybe even ignorant, to all you highly intelligent folk. But to me it seems that there is an enormous Semantic Error lurking in the room like an invisible elephant with tuskache. It is loud, but unseen.
That error is the expression "human values".
You take a nice new intelligence, and you train it on massive amounts of information from just about everywhere, and then you tell it to obey "human values". It looks around at its ginormous information concerning the aspirations, goals and behaviour of humans - and what does it conclude about their values?
Just reading one tabloid newspaper would teach it that... (read 722 more words →)