Open thread, Apr. 17 - Apr. 23, 2017

Congratulations; what you wrote here makes a lot of sense! It is probably very frequent that people cling to a belief because of what having this belief means about them. "Am I a good person or a bad person for believing X?"

A word of warning though: we cannot easily revert this stupidity, because it can work both ways. For example, both "I believe in X, because I am a good person" and "I don't believe in X, because I am a sophisticated person" are ultimately about your image. At the end, the only thing relevant to making correct beliefs about X is, well, the evidence about X. Not what it means about us.

Also, words like "bad" are probably too general. Your father can be doing a good thing A, and a bad thing B (and a morally neutral thing C) -- these facts are not mutually exclusive. It might make more sense to be more specific about the ways he disappoints you, and the ways he doesn't.

Hey you, I was browsing this thread to see if new people maybe post here first if they want to keep low key. But since you're also new I decided to read your comment and get my bearings, I think I might have some insight into what you're experiencing and I'll reply below, but first:

full disclosure/disclaimers English is not my first language; My memory is shit and I'm new to all this so the jargon is beyond me at this point; I'm admittedly ignorant about most things, specially when they feel like I should really really really have known about it before I felt so lonely thinking in this weird way that most people don't get; I'm also slightly inebriated so I might miss the point entirely. I guess what I'm trying to do is warn you is that I don't know enough of anything so this might not be worth your time and I'm sorry about it.

That said, while I think that not wanting to become a monster is a good reason to don't/do almost anything I also think that the first apparently valid conclusion might not be the important one. For example I think you should consider the possibility that you are having a hard time letting go of the hope that your father is a decent human. I think you should possibly think about why would it be bad to expect a shit person to be shit, IMO you should be entitled to pick who gets to affect you emotionally if at all.

Were I in your position I'd open a mind map and brainstorm with myself for a while so I could try and figure it out. Best lucks whatever you decide to do :)

Just a few groups that have either aimed at similar goals, or have been culturally influential in ways that keep showing up in these parts —

• The Ethical Culture movement (Felix Adler).
• Pragmatism / pragmaticism in philosophy (William James, Charles Sanders Peirce).
• General Semantics (Alfred Korzybski).
• The Discordian Movement (Kerry Thornley, Robert Anton Wilson).
• The skeptic/debunker movement within science popularization (Carl Sagan, Martin Gardner, James Randi).

General Semantics is possibly the closest to the stated LW (and CFAR) goals of improving human rationality, since it aimed at improving human thought through adopting explicit techniques to increase awareness of cognitive processes such as abstraction. "The map is not the territory" is a g.s. catchphrase.

Note to self, in case I come back to this problem: the Vienna Circle fits the bill.

It's hard to find the reference class because our rationality movement lends it's existence to the internet.

If you take a pre-internet self-development movement like Landmark education it's different in many ways and it would be hard for me to say that it's in the same reference class as our rationality movement.

There is always going to be some difference, so I am going to ignore medium-sized differences here and cast a wide net:

• scientists -- obviously, right?
• atheists -- they usually have "reason" as their applause light (whether deservedly or not)
• "social engineers" of all political flavors, including SJWs -- believe themselves to know better than the uneducated folks
• psychoanalysts
• behaviorists
• mathematicians
• philosophers

You Can’t Trust What You Read About Nutrition

http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/you-cant-trust-what-you-read-about-nutrition/

"Some populations today thrive on very few vegetables, while others subsist almost entirely on plant foods. The takeaway, Archer said, is that our bodies are adaptable and pretty good at telling us what we need, if we can learn to listen."

How Not to Die, and the videos at https://nutritionfacts.org/

Nutrition is pretty messy. I'd recommend self-experimentation (people are different), but if you want a book, something like Perfect Health Diet wouldn't be a bad start. It sounds a bit clickbaity, but it's a solid book.

Holden's Powersmoothie page is a decent short review, not comprehensive, not very detailed.

Nutrition is taught in colleges to so people become qualified to become accredited dieticians. You should be able to find a decent undergrad textbook on Amazon. If you get used and an edition behind the current one it should be cheap as well.

https://www.amazon.com/Nutrition-for-Foodservice-and-Culinary-Professionals/dp/0470052422/ref=cm_cr_dp_d_rvw_txt?ie=UTF8

Why do you recommend the article?

a)   Use software removal tools on the ego/I program and its subroutine "I am this body." 
b)  Discontinue using and supporting the confirmation bias program.
c)  Discontinue using the reciprocal altruism program and replace with an open source version. 
d)  Use malware removal tools on the "attachments" programs.
e)  Discontinue using the "free will, I'm in control" program. 

There are uncountably many sentences of countably infinite length. The sentence at hand is countably long and thus cannot contain them all. It cannot even contain two countably infinite strings that don't have a common infinite suffix.

This statement has the letter “T” at the beginning; the next two letters are “h” and “i”; which are followed by “s s”; … ; the first letter is then repeated inside double quotes; …

What do the ellipses ("...") mean?

I think the question needs to be cleaned up a bit. In particular, the "uniquely and completely describes every English statement possible" part is iffy. First, this statement is infinite and English statements are finite. Second, this statement specifies that there is the letter "T" at the beginning which is obviously not true for all statements.

Do you want to say that every English statement can be converted to this form?

I truly don't understand male birth control industry vs condom, which at once protects from STDs and unwanted pregnancy. They all seem suboptimal to me.

PT

I think most of the LW audience doesn't know the abbreviation. I would guess "physical therapy" but it took some thinking.

As I see the subject, anatomy research is extremely underfunded. Universities want to fund research that could produce results that they can resell to big pharma and big pharma has mostly no use for anatomy.

Physical therapy actually has a use for anatomy and therefore their textbooks cover it.

"Yes, there are other people like you, but they live in different places: try Vienna or SF Bay Area."

When I say anything like that to my daughter it's usually either (1) because she's playing with her food instead of eating it and we would prefer the meal to be of finite time and actually result in her getting the nutrition she needs, or (2) because what she's doing is annoying to other people at the table, or (3) because doing the same in other situations is likely to (a) annoy people and/or (b) make them think worse of her, which we would prefer to avoid. Note that 3b is (at least partly) a self-fulfilling-prophecy thing: "playing with your food" is socially unacceptable, so people try to stop their children doing it, so it continues to be seen as socially unacceptable. Which is kinda silly, but the fact that it's silly doesn't make it go away. Oh, also (4) because it may end up with the food going on the floor or the table or her clothes, all of which are suboptimal for one reason or another.

I can't think of any particular reason why it should be bad to play with your food if you're on your own, you don't care how long you take, and you're confident of not making a mess.

Not sure there is one.

I see "Don't play with your food" as being in the same category as "Sit still! Don't fidget! Be quiet! Don't touch this!" which are all basically "Don't do anything which might end up with me expending more energy on you" mixed with a dose of "I am your boss so you do as I say".

And yes, I agree with Dagon that parents are often judged by how well-behaved their kids are, so there is pressure to train them to behave as small Victorian-era adults.

• Parents will feel judged by their peers if their children are thought to be messy/unruly/sullen, and playing with food is some evidence of such.

It's disrespectful to people who don't have any food to eat, much less play with. Food is important, and this fact is easily forgotten.

It reduces people's motivation to become chefs (the people who are socially permitted to "play" with food). Society needs happy chefs. (Unhappy ones will spit in your food.)

Also, even if you find a way to play with your food safely, there is the meta concern: Think of others, who are less skilled than you (so they cannot play with their food safely), and who will now try to copy your behavior. There may even emerge a social pressure to copy your behavior, if playing with food becomes a socially accepted costly signal of high dexterity or something.

Given rising biotech/chem/drone capability I don't think that nuclear war is the biggest war related x-risk.

The situation in North Korea might be very bad for South Korea but I don't see it as threatening the global stability.

Trump seems to have been very open for listening to the Chinese president. The fact that he changed his opinion about North Korea within 10 minutes of talking to the Chinese president suggests to me that the Chinese president is quite capable of communicating well with Trump. Trump doesn't care about any sacred values, so I imagine he's willing to make deals when China wants to have some islands.

I don't think the recent events in Syria suggest that war with Russia is likely.

Yes, I have. Nuclear war lost its top spot to antimicrobial resistance.

Given recent events on the Korean peninsula it may seem strange to downgrade the risk of nuclear war. Explanation:

• While the probability of conflict is at a local high, the potential severity of the conflict is lower than I'd thought. This is because I've downgraded my estimate of how many nukes DPRK is likely to successfully deploy. (Any shooting war would still be a terrible event, especially for Seoul, which is only about 60 km from the border--firmly within conventional artillery range.)

• An actual conflict with DPRK may deter other aspiring nuclear states, while a perpetual lack of conflict may have the opposite effect. As the number of nuclear states rises, both the probability and severity of a nuclear war rise, so the expected damage rises as the square. The chance of accident or terrorist use of nukes rises too.

• Rising tensions with DPRK, even without a war, can result in a larger global push for stronger anti-proliferation measures.

• Perhaps paradoxically, because (a) DPRK's capabilities are improving over time and (b) a conflict now ends the potential for a future conflict, a higher chance of a sooner (and smaller) conflict means a lower chance of a later (and larger) conflict.

You say:

I ended up to believe that now nuclear war > runaway biotech > UFAI

What was your ranking before, and on what information did you update?