themusicgod1

Clearly.  But whatever they are, they should still be represented, and there may be similarly wild things in the outlying areas of their worldview - and if I can help them reach it I will.  In my experience it's the ideas in the hinterlands that are the way out of the problems of our time, regardless what our time is - merely seeing that our worldview has outliers, and the overton window is limiting us in one area is usually enough to see that we're limited elsewhere, too.

Pretty sure this is the question underlying https://www.overcomingbias.com/2007/01/disagree_with_s.html 

Similarly, an even more defensible position might be Buddhist one, or that happiness is transitory and mostly a construction of the mind, and virtually always attached to suffering, but suffering is real and worth minimizing.

This post is generalizable, even if you don't think that it's wrong to kill people as a general rule there's probably some other moral act #G_30429 that you probably don't think that it would be appropriate and the point still holds: Rowhammering the bit that says "Don't do #G_30429" is probably not as impossible as it seems in the long run.

(Meta: when thinking about this I found it difficult to recall all of the arguments I've learned in moral philosophy over the past 16 years of trying that would have been applicable. I knew where you were g... (read more)

This assumes that the people around you generally do the right thing. If you operate under the alternative assumption (which is much more reasonable) you would likely still be alive.

Modernized version as of 2017, of the first part of this post : http://82.221.128.217/trolley-lw.png

More serious reply: depending when you encountered me, I'd be more boring in some ways, since a lot of what I spend my time doing is towards a moral end. All the things I've learned in life I learned from trying to live in a moral universe. I would never have gotten a degree, I did that virtually entirely for what I perceived to be reasons of altruism. Since I'm assuming here that everyone else will continue to live under the illusion that they are in suc... (read more)

This brings up the Sapir Worf hypothesis, or the newspeak for it, "Linguistic Relativity". After all, memes must be expressible, musn't they? If they are then if it were true, then the memes that you have bound the memes that you can espouse -- linguistic relativity in a nutshell.

Many memes these days come in picture form, but for that you need a medium capable of showing pictures, and the culture that places value in making such media universally available. Without that culture, and without the apparatus to share picture-memes those memes wou... (read more)

Here's what you actually wanted to link to for "looking back"

My concern isn't with the interview per se(everything I would add would best be put in another thread). It's with the reaction here in the comments here.

That 90% wasn't a waste anymore than overcomingbias as a blog is a waste. Horgan is hardly alone in remembering the Fifth Generation Project and it was worth it to get Yudkowsky to hammer out, once more, to a new audience why what happened in the 80's was not representative of what is to come in the 10ky timeframe. Those of you who are hard on Horgan he is not one of you. You cannot hold him to LW stan... (read more)

The parent made 3 claims(the 3rd one was snuck into the conclusion). I only addressed 2 and 3. 1 is a credible point that stands on its own merit. Without points 2 and 3 however with 1 it's no longer a sound argument.

edit PaleMoon lost original reply. I will try to recreate it :(

Not saying you're incorrect in criticizing the above(the two claims do seem incompatible), but isn't it the case that algorithms are just structures and that only they take time only to run? What I mean is that within the block-universe view there would be structures that we would be in ignorance of their nature and in order for us to learn about them we might have to count them (and since we are living in a timeline with computers that operate per cycle our accounting of them would take som... (read more)

Our children will look back at the fact that we were STILL ARGUING about this in the early 21st-century, and correctly deduce that we were nuts.

We're still arguing whether or not the world is flat, whether the zodiac should be used to predict near-term fate and whether we should be building stockpiles of nuclear weapons. There's billions left to connect to the internet, and most extant human languages to this day have no written form. Basic literacy and mathematics is still something much of the world struggles with. This is going to go on for awhile... (read more)

Supporting evidence for this is in the news this week

(this is the second copy of this comment, the first was regrettably lost in a browser crash. Use systems that back up your comments automatically)

This advice seems to fly in the face of Richard Hamming's advice to keep an open door. However perhaps the difference is subtle: Hamming suggested to have an open door but not necessarily to share your secrets, so perhaps there is room for a big science mystery cult to retain its own mysteries at every level of initiation. Perhaps there is a middle ground[1] to be found between this and current 'open science'... (read more)

The question may have once been which poet gets quoted when rainbows are brought up. If Keats isn't adding to the discussion in a meaningful way anymore since his metaphors will play second fiddle to the ones that of Newton, which were wonderful and exciting enough that Newton was driven to poking himself in the eye with a needle over them. I don't know if Keats even in his heyday could have claimed that. It may have been that his views on rainbows were propagated in some ingroup, until someone from that ingroup quoted them to someone in an ingroup with ... (read more)

Either way, the question is guaranteed to have an answer. You even have a nice, concrete place to begin tracing—your belief, sitting there solidly in your mind.

In retrospect this seems like an obvious implication of belief in belief. I would have probably never figured it out on my own, but now that I've seen both, I can't unsee the connection.

No one has complicated thoughts about several dreams from totally different genres while experiencing that one is unable to move a muscle without being awake.

...I've had some pretty complicated dreams, where I've woken up from a dream(!), gone to work, made coffee, had discussions about the previous dream, had thoughts about the morality or immorality of the dream, then sometime later come to a conclusion that something was out of place(I'm not wearing pants?!) then woken up to realize that I was dreaming. I've had nested dreams a good couple of layers... (read more)

Looks like somewhere along the transition to lesswrong, the trackback to this related OB post appears to have been lost. It's worth digging a step deeper for the context, here.

Including: "twitter", "altruism", "trust", "start" and "curiosity" apparently?