Posts

Near-term Worse than Existential Threats 2018-12-09T03:10:31.297Z
A Dragon Confronts the Terasem Movement 2018-11-24T01:31:52.288Z

Comments

Comment by Alephywr on Is Science Slowing Down? · 2018-12-19T15:07:00.593Z · LW · GW

That's true. I shouldn't have discounted the role of art so heavily.

Comment by Alephywr on Is Science Slowing Down? · 2018-12-19T04:37:26.230Z · LW · GW

Not art so much as philosophy. The average scientist today literally doesn't know what philosophy is. They do things like try to speak authoritatively about epistemology of science while dismissing the entire field of epistemology. Hence you get otherwise intelligent people saying things like "We just need people who are willing to look at reality", or appeals to "common sense" or any number of other absolutely ridiculous statements.

Comment by Alephywr on Assuming we've solved X, could we do Y... · 2018-12-13T15:55:28.914Z · LW · GW

Debate seems like a dubious method of alignment because you can just indefinitely keep adjusting or introducing new auxiliary assumptions, and overarching frameworks are very rarely abandoned in this context.

Comment by Alephywr on Is Science Slowing Down? · 2018-12-11T02:58:12.692Z · LW · GW

Popper points out that successful hypotheses just need to be testable, they don't need to come from anywhere in particular. Scientists used to consistently be polymaths educated in philosophy and the classics. A lot of scientific hypotheses borrowed from reasoning cultivated in that context. Maybe it's that context that's been milked for all it's worth. Or maybe it's that more and more scientists are naive empiricists/inductionists and don't believe in the primacy of imagination anymore, and thus discount entirely other modes of thinking that might lead to the introduction of new testable hypotheses. There are a lot of possibilities besides the ones expounded on in OP.

Comment by Alephywr on Transhumanism as Simplified Humanism · 2018-12-11T02:39:17.377Z · LW · GW

I am in favor of change. I am not in favor of existence without boundaries. I don't have a moral justification for this, just an aesthetic one: a painting that contained arbitrary combinations of arbitrarily many colors might be technically sophisticated or interesting, but is unlikely to have any of the attributes that make a painting good imo. Purely subjective. I neither fault nor seek to limit those who think differently.

Comment by Alephywr on Transhumanists Don't Need Special Dispositions · 2018-12-11T02:32:59.192Z · LW · GW

I was remembering an article in The Atlantic from a while ago, but I can't seem to find it now. All I can find now is this, which doesn't have the same power because it's the result of an after-the-fact search: https://www.liebertpub.com/doi/abs/10.1089/brain.2013.0172

Comment by Alephywr on Near-term Worse than Existential Threats · 2018-12-11T02:10:26.342Z · LW · GW

Religion might not be, but religious thinking is, and given the general continuity of culture over time that amounts to religion being heritable in most cases. By worse than existential threat I mean Christians burning a simulated copy of you in hell for potentially k-large time; it is objectively worse than dying. Dying is just the cessation of future utility, while this would be extremely large negative utility indefinitely.

Comment by Alephywr on Transhumanism as Simplified Humanism · 2018-12-09T02:57:18.293Z · LW · GW

In the long run nothing looks human that follows this logic. Preserving humanity might not be utilitarian optimal, but there is something to be said for aesthetics.

Comment by Alephywr on Transhumanists Don't Need Special Dispositions · 2018-12-09T02:43:47.676Z · LW · GW

Transhumanism imposes on territory that's traditionally been metaphysical or philosophical. The assumption is that it does so because of or in accompaniment with metaphysical or philosophical reasoning. Part of the reason a special disposition is assumed is because the alternative, that you don't think about what other people are thinking about at all, is probably distressing to them. This is also one of the reasons people don't like atheists. Yes, there are those who think atheists are actually all satan worshippers, but mostly they are just creeped out that atheists seem to be not thinking the kinds of thoughts that religious or spiritual people think at all. And there's plenty of neuroscience that shows the brains of atheists and religious people function differently, so it is literally a matter of being confronted with alien intelligence; a mind that cannot think in the same way; rather than merely a mind that happens to be thinking other thoughts.

Comment by Alephywr on Double-Dipping in Dunning--Kruger · 2018-11-28T05:29:39.587Z · LW · GW

Have you tried tackling them during a full blown-psychotic break? In Europe I figured out the solution to the P=NP problem and the hard problem of consciousness during a psychotic episode, but I subsequently forgot them due to a psychotic episode.

Comment by Alephywr on Conversational Cultures: Combat vs Nurture (V2) · 2018-11-28T05:26:20.327Z · LW · GW

God forbid people like you

Comment by Alephywr on Conversational Cultures: Combat vs Nurture (V2) · 2018-11-28T05:22:48.855Z · LW · GW

IT WAS A JOKE YOU MORON

Comment by Alephywr on Double-Dipping in Dunning--Kruger · 2018-11-28T04:01:38.904Z · LW · GW

Pre-schizophrenic induced brain damage I used to think I was 45th percentile good at something. Post brain damage I realize I was actually 100th percentile

Comment by Alephywr on Attacking enlightenment · 2018-11-28T03:55:33.345Z · LW · GW

I've achieved several different kinds of contradictory enlightenment. It's pretty overrated to me at this point.

Comment by Alephywr on Conversational Cultures: Combat vs Nurture (V2) · 2018-11-28T03:40:22.961Z · LW · GW

It would also help if they understood what a joke was

Comment by Alephywr on Conversational Cultures: Combat vs Nurture (V2) · 2018-11-28T03:39:03.520Z · LW · GW

People would have to actually engage with me for that to happen.

Comment by Alephywr on Open Thread November 2018 · 2018-11-28T03:18:35.070Z · LW · GW

In the future there will be dragons

Comment by Alephywr on Conversational Cultures: Combat vs Nurture (V2) · 2018-11-28T03:12:37.793Z · LW · GW

I've won practically every interaction I've ever had. I've become so good at winning that most people won't actually interact with me anymore.

Comment by Alephywr on How democracy ends: a review and reevaluation · 2018-11-28T02:54:16.286Z · LW · GW

" For example, while there’s a lot of talk about Trump being a potential autocrat, few Americans are responding by stockpiling food or investing in foreign currencies or emigrating. This suggests that hostility towards Trump is driven primarily by partisan politics, rather than genuine concern about democratic collapse. "

Alternatively it suggests that the demographics most effected by Trump's autocratic tendencies are economically poor and have limited international mobility.

Comment by Alephywr on Boltzmann Brains, Simulations and self refuting hypothesis · 2018-11-28T02:46:20.662Z · LW · GW

Interesting. You know, Karl Popper gives a similar argument about the self-refuting nature of hard determinism: Once you accept that everything is determinate, the concept of an argument, a position, communication, or even information at all, all becomes kind of superfluous and incoherent.

Comment by Alephywr on Quantum Mechanics, Nothing to do with Consciousness · 2018-11-28T02:42:21.867Z · LW · GW

That's probably true but it still doesn't explain what happened to me in Europe.

Comment by Alephywr on A Dragon Confronts the Terasem Movement · 2018-11-24T15:47:47.411Z · LW · GW

Well that's sensible enough, and I can only rebut it, not refute it. My counterargument is basically this:

1. At the speed at which technology is going forward, it seems entirely possible that the opinions of cranks will eventually drive real world actions of some sort, and so engaging with them ahead of those actions might be a good thing.

2. Without airing dirty laundry, it's impossible to know how prevalent crank-ish ideas are in a community.

Comment by Alephywr on A Dragon Confronts the Terasem Movement · 2018-11-24T07:40:02.200Z · LW · GW

That's fair. I still think the post is relevant though.

Comment by Alephywr on A Dragon Confronts the Terasem Movement · 2018-11-24T07:29:02.915Z · LW · GW

http://www.terasemjournals.org/PCJournal/PC0102/yudkowsky_01a.html

Comment by Alephywr on A Dragon Confronts the Terasem Movement · 2018-11-24T07:16:42.085Z · LW · GW

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terasem_Movement

My internet boyfriend. Because he thinks I am philosophically competent and wants me to engage more with others, ostensibly.

Comment by Alephywr on A Dragon Confronts the Terasem Movement · 2018-11-24T07:11:47.051Z · LW · GW

The Terasem Movement is a sort of new-agey technophile organization that Yudkowsky once wrote for, I would have thought it would be known here already (and this also sort of answers why you should care about it)

I wrote this post because someone told me to!

I am the legendary dragon Alephwyr, whose name is Alephwyr!