47 Matching Annotations
  1. Aug 2024
    1. Interesting, when we say "I don't have time", you can in some, if not most, cases replace it with "I am not in the mood for this", because you prioritize other things you feel more like doing.

  2. Jul 2024
    1. Lennox argues that both rationality and morality cannot be explained without the Bible & God... Humans are naturally rational and moral beings because "Man are created in God's image" or "The Holy Spirit remains in men"

      The Holy Ghost is the reason we can tell right from wrong (spiritual anti-virus)... However, the more we sin, the more we silence this voice in our head until ultimately we cannot hear it anymore.

      No person is born a criminal. A killer.

      When we get baptized, we effectively restore our connection to God, and thus reenact the Holy Ghost within us; restoring our innocence. Our soul's integrity has been restored and we can hear the Spirit speaking to us loud and clear once again.

      As Simone Weil argued, the purpose of a punishment, an adequate one, that is, is to cleanse the taint of our behavior from ourselves... Allowing ourselves to get back into humanity without judgement. Baptism serves the same purpose on a Spiritual level... With the key difference being that it was Christ who endured the ultimate punishment, and by being baptized (willingly), we enjoy that same punishment, can reap its benefits.

  3. Apr 2024
    1. Sturm und Drang (/ˌʃtʊərm ʊnt ˈdræŋ, - ˈdrɑːŋ/,[1] .mw-parser-output .IPA-label-small{font-size:85%}.mw-parser-output .references .IPA-label-small,.mw-parser-output .infobox .IPA-label-small,.mw-parser-output .navbox .IPA-label-small{font-size:100%}German: [ˈʃtʊʁm ʔʊnt ˈdʁaŋ]; usually translated as "storm and stress"[2]) was a proto-Romantic movement in German literature and music that occurred between the late 1760s and early 1780s. Within the movement, individual subjectivity and, in particular, extremes of emotion were given free expression in reaction to the perceived constraints of rationalism imposed by the Enlightenment and associated aesthetic movements.

      Sturm und Drang is an art movement that formed as a result of marching rationalism (see Enlightenment) and valued subjectivity and emotions.

  4. Feb 2022
    1. 5. Emotional Issues Rule The Co-Parenting Relationship: There are some parents who either can’t or obstinately refuse to move past emotional issues left over from the divorce. If your co-parent is passive aggressive or, God forbid, you are co-parenting with a narcissist, you will find that regardless of how civil you attempt to be the co-parenting relationship will be riddled with conflict. How can this conflict be resolved? Unless the parent with emotional issues seeks help, there will be no resolution. A parent with a personality disorder has an inherent blind spot when it comes to what is and isn’t in their children’s best interest. As the reasonable, healthy parent you need to focus on the fact that you are dealing with someone with psychological issues and do the work needed to protect your children from harm.

      toxic rationality

      "emos are sick and need therapy"

      "ratios are sane and should decide everything"

      fuck you

  5. Dec 2021
    1. But in this case calling Martin Luther King a criminal is the noncentral. The archetypal criminal is a mugger or bank robber.

      it's an ideological / propagandistic tool to use someone's implicit representation (stereotype) of some category to demonize something that appears to be a member of that category, but is not really in it upon deeper reflection. bypasses rational means with emotional, non-conscious, non-reflective judgements

  6. Aug 2021
  7. Jul 2021
  8. Apr 2021
    1. Denialism is an essentially irrational action that withholds the validation of a historical experience or event, when a person refuses to accept an empirically verifiable reality.
  9. Mar 2021
    1. Finally, any approach to evidence-based man-agement should ensure that the practices suit theindustry and functional context. For example,professionals in a biotechnology company would beexpected to follow and use industry-appropriateevidence-based practices that are likely to bemore rigorous and extensive than those adopted bya fashion-clothing company. Such practices includeencouraging or even requiring their employees todo the following four things (seePfeffer & Sutton,2006): (1) demand evidence for statements thatseem implausible; (2) examine the logic or cause-and-effect reasoning between the evidence andthe statement; (3) as needed, encourage experi-mentation to test the confidence of data and val-idity of statements; and (4) continually repeat andbuild on the first three activities to create anevidence-based learning culture that stifles theproduction and spread of bullshit.
  10. Feb 2021
    1. In retrospect, such a meme, then all in fun,now seems to pose a significant PR problem for transhumanists. Despite their youthfully optimistic parties and wordplay, extropianism always had a serious and strongly academic side and, over time, in keeping with its principle of self-transformation, the handshakes and the outfits fell away. This is perhaps part of the reason that some former extropians and early transhumanists, who remain active transhumanists today, rarely mention Machado and her antics when reflecting on the early days of transhumanism.

      Suspect the rationalists will encounter Many Such Cases as time goes on.

  11. Oct 2020
    1. Rationality and transparency are the values of classical liberalism. Rationality and transparency are supposed to be what make free markets and democratic elections work. People understand how the system functions, and that allows them to make rational choices.

      But economically, we know there isn't perfect knowledge or perfect rationality (see Tversky and Khaneman). There is rarely every perfect transparency either which makes things much harder, especially in a post-truth society apparenlty.

  12. Aug 2020
    1. Cells, for example, are a central category, but there’s no definite criterion for what counts as a cell. If you attempt to find one, you rapidly bog down in a maze of exceptions. You might start with something like “a self-reproducing living unit carrying a single copy of the organism’s DNA within a membrane.” But red blood cells don’t self-reproduce and have no DNA. Mitochondria are not cells, but they self-reproduce using their own DNA within a membrane. Muscle cells have multiple nuclei, each with a separate complete copy of the DNA. Some algae have life stages in which they have no cell membranes. And so on indefinitely.8

      I'm not an expert in biology or anything, but perhaps the moral there is we should rethink this 'cell' idea? IIRC astronomers continue to talk about 'planets' even though the longer you examine the concept the more incoherent it becomes. (For an extended example, see the infamous Discourse about whether "Pluto is a planet", which led to hilarious goal post stretching where people kept trying to find a definition of 'planet' that exactly fit the traditional celestial objects we classify as planets without having to include any new ones or exclude existing ones)

      There is obviously no rule that says the categorizations we come up with for stuff when a field is young should be expected to have infinite inferential reach as that field of knowledge expands.

    2. The dream is that reduction could deliver absolute truths about the eggplant-sized world, by explanation through a series of levels. The rationalist’s reflex, when confronted with nebulosity, is to retreat to the most fundamental physics: quantum field theory. That, she says, is definitely not nebulous; there is absolute truth there.2 Based on this unshakable foundation, we can find absolute truths about atoms, which are just assemblages of quanta. And we can reduce molecules to atoms (chemistry), and cells to molecules (molecular biology), and eggplants to cells (phytotomy); and finally, triumphantly, prove beyond any possibility of doubt the absolute truth that eggplants are fruits (reproductive biology).

      Has anyone ever actually proposed something like this?

      Actually, let me rephrase, has anyone we have any good reason to take philosophically seriously ever actually proposed something like this, in a context I would care about?

      Something like, an important philosopher that people-who-do-stuff take seriously (it's not my job to police whatever degenerate things academia gets up to separated from course correcting incentives) making a serious unironic proposal along these lines that nontrivial resources were invested into?

    1. Unlike logicism, probabilism doesn’t require an absolute belief about what the truth of a statement is. However, it does require that any statement actually is either absolutely true or absolutely false. Suppose you want to know if there is any water in the refrigerator. To eliminate uncertainty, you look inside, and there appears to be only an eggplant. Now, is there water in the refrigerator? Well, with probability nearly 1.0, it’s sort of true that there is (in the cells of the eggplant).3 And with probability nearly 1.0, it’s sort of false (you were thirsty and there’s nothing to drink). It’s a rock-bottom principle of the mathematics that the probability of a statement being true and the probability of it being false have to add up to 1.0. (This is a different way of stating the Law of the Excluded Middle.) Here the probabilities of sort-of truth and sort-of falsity add up to nearly 2.0, which is uninterpretable as a probability. The math doesn’t work for sort-of truths.

      This argument strikes me as malformed and perverse.

      Obviously there's a conflation here between two different questions, but I think a deeper error is implied by the fact of the conflation.

      You seem to suppose there is some objective 'literal' sense of the statement "Is there water in the fridge?". Considering you wrote earlier that beliefs are not strings of words (reasonable), it's weird to then use that as a premise to argue against Bayesian Epistemology. Words are a way to locate things in concept space, and epistemology doesn't exist separate from neurology. There are no real agents that make this mistake, because it's more or less based on a type error. A Bayesian Epistemology is de-facto not enough to replicate human cognition, if it was then artificial intelligence would be solved. That doesn't stop it from being pretty powerful in conjunction with the world modeling capabilities of a human brain.

      More to the point: At the moment of posing the question, any sensibly designed agent capable of being in this situation wielding a Bayesian Epistemology knows exactly which of these two questions it is posing when it thinks "Is there water in the fridge?" in its internal monologue. The conflation only exists when an outsider observer tries to impute some literal meaning to a thing that is contextually in a system of meaning extending beyond the words in the sentence.

    2. and it is technically true that eggplants are berries.

      I tend to find it's useful to handle this case with the notion of category membership having a spatial organization. Leading to the whole idea of things being central, noncentral, midway, etc members of categories. 'Eggplants are noncentrally berries' communicates precisely what we mean, they are berries, but they're also not what is typically imagined as a berry.

    1. In Parts Four and Five, we’ll see how meta-rationality selectively integrates reasonableness and rationality to make both work better.

      Unfortunately the full description of 'reasonableness' is not currently present, but it's given in short as "everyday informal thinking and acting". Which, to wit: So what is that made of anyway? It's not like informal reasoning just exists an a magic phenomena. Clearly, there is some kind of machine (us) existing in the world that implements this informal reasoning algorithm. Obviously we can't know exactly how it works, but I think of a lot of the 'rationality' critiqued here as increasingly powerful models of what that thing is made of; that is the entire point arguably.

      That these models suck is fair game, but it's important not to conflate the people who geek out about formal systems with the people trying to derive the code to human cognition with the people trying to get a decent working model of human cognition so they can augment it with heuristics et al.

    2. In “the eggplant is a fruit,” probably what is meant is that all eggplants are fruits. In “the dog is a Samoyed,” probably what is meant is that some dog is a Samoyed. We can reasonably assume these meanings from our background understanding of their topics. This knowledge is nowhere in the sentence. The meaning depends on its parts—but not only on them.

      It's common in speech coding (e.g. a vocoder) to rely on a thing that reconstructs the 'meaning' of a signal by predicting its 'full' representation.

      This act of predicting then is also a form of compressing, by predicting the full representation from its lossy analogue you require less bandwidth to transmit messages just like if you'd used a non-stochastic compression technique.

    1. Using esoteric equipment and methods to get some tiny bit of reality to behave according to theory is most of what you do in a science lab.

      Not quite. You use esoteric equipment and methods to get the opportunity to make an observation of some tiny bit of reality that would help you narrow down hypothesis space.

    2. When your statistical analysis determines with high confidence that the moon is made of green cheese, you should not rush to publish your exciting discovery.

      I kind of feel like I'm being Motte-Bailey'd here. This book feels like it's responding to Eliezer Yudkowsky, yet this is literally the kind of scenario you have the notion of a 'prior' for. My prior probability that the moon is made of green cheese is very low. So low in fact that not even a crazy statistical analysis is going to convince me otherwise, the lie contagion factor is off the charts. That is, for the moon to be made of green cheese lots of other stuff I'm pretty confident is true has to be false.

  13. Jul 2020
  14. Jun 2020
    1. In philosophy, empiricism is a theory that states that knowledge comes only or primarily from sensory experience.[1] It is one of several views of epistemology, along with rationalism and skepticism.
  15. May 2020
  16. Apr 2020
  17. Mar 2020
    1. proud of their ignorance of the facts, who are proud of thinking that their desires or their “gut feel” somehow takes priority over rational thought
    2. Taking pride in one’s ignorance and stupidity and refusal to engage in the world thoughtfully should be socially unacceptable
  18. Feb 2020
  19. Jul 2019
    1. WE’RE MOSTLY JUST DESPERATELY FLAILING AROUND LOOKING FOR SOLUTIONS HERE.

      The "it's all complexity" take would be that we aren't even really looking for solutions, but rather decision-makers are all advocates (because it takes so much effort to have an informed opinion, effort which is uncompensated unless you're a professional advocate) who use evidence of problems to burnish their personal reputations.

  20. Mar 2019
    1. The pioneer of behavioral economists was Herbert Simon, who developed the notion of bounded rationality, namely that an individual is rational, but that their ability to compute, assess, and decide are limited especially given constraints on time to make a decision.
  21. Feb 2019
  22. Nov 2016
    1. a test of R.Q. would measure the propensity for reflective thought — stepping back from your own thinking and correcting its faulty tendencies.

      -Wisdom vs Intelligence

      -Cosmic Perspective (?).

  23. Nov 2015
    1. Infrastructures, for Collier, are amixture of political rationality, administrative techniques, and material systems, and his interest isnot in infrastructure per se but in what it tells us about practices of government. Soviet electricityprovision, through this lens, is analyzed for how it reveals a system of total planning in a commandeconomy rather than for what it tells us about the effects of electricity on users in Russia.

      It's never really about what is in front of us when it comes to politics.. there is always more to it.. His theory is a tool we could study to learn about a country/society's government by looking at the infrastructure they've created.

  24. Apr 2015
    1. Less Wrong is a community blog devoted to refining the art of human rationality. Please visit our About page for more information.
  25. Sep 2014
    1. I think that the nature of the psychedelic experience is challenging to the rationalists’ basis of Western ideas.

      I don't agree and don't want to see psychedelics welcomed into mainstream culture through glorification of the extra-logical. It's this sort of attitude that allowed exploitative, self-proclaimed gurus to thrive in the psychedelic scene. By all means, take a journey with a psychedelic, but then come back and process it and put it in perspective with what you think you know about your life and reality and continue to think critically about your relationships and your needs.

  26. Nov 2013