Let's say you're afflicted by a severe illness and have, say, 5 % odds of surviving. If you end up dying of it, all of your organs will be damaged beyond repair. However, as of now they're still fine and safe for organ donation. How do you feel about cutting to the chase and committing suicide right here and now so you can produce a fresh dead body with superior utilitarian value?
Stochastic time tracking is an interesting approach where you don't need to start and stop timers on your own. The system pings you at random intervals and you answer what you're currently doing. Then you count each sample point as the average sampling interval spent doing the task that was sampled.
I like comments that don't look like they could have been generated by a chatbot. I feel like whenever I'm being fine with the "Good post!" comments, I'm setting up an environment where after a while a portion of the comments will actually be chatbot spam.
No mention of the anthropic principle? Lots of existing thinking in these lines under that term.
I remember a sort of consensus from the 00s that memetics had failed as a research program and the big-name people like Dawkins and Blackmore moving on to other stuff. Here's one summary I found. People still find the metaphor compelling, so it might just be that right now nobody has a good idea how to study the thing rigorously.
The description sounded like both parties were assuming chakras involved some actual mystical energy and were doing the invisible garage dragon dance. The parapsychology angle to this one is simple that even without knowing about a specific rebuttal, chakras are a well-known mystical concept, parapsychology research has been poking at most of the obvious mystical claims, and if parapsychology had verified that some supernatural phenomenon is actually real, we'd have heard of it.
If they were talking about the non-mystical model, the first person could've just said that it's a possibly helpful visualization shorthand for doing relaxation and biofeedback exercises and there's no actual supernatural energies involved.
Hmm, no, let’s not do that. It makes me uncomfortable. I can’t tell why, but I don’t want to do it, so let’s not
After 100 years of parapsychology research, it's pretty obvious to anyone with a halfway functioning outside view that any quick experiment will either be flawed or say chakras are not real, so I'm not sure whether to take this as face value of the person thinking chakras are real-real and genuinely not being able to say why they don't want to do the experiment, or just saying a polite-speak version of "we both know doing the experiment will show chakras aren't real and will make me lose face, you're making a status grab against me for putting me on the spot by demanding the experiment so fuck you and fuck your experiment."
John McCarthy's The Doctor's Dilemma
If you take the paper at face value, wouldn't you expect a lot of the chronically depressed rats to be jumping at the chance to trade off the ability to remember appointments with no longer subjectively suffering from depression?
"The Soviet Union is politically dysfunctional"