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How did you even discover that you have aphantasia without discovering that "picture something in your mind" isn't metaphorical?
You're using "analogy" to describe what I was always taught is a "simile".
if people are as astonishingly bad at the task as the paper says, that just reflects on their memory, not the acuity of their mind's eye.
What makes you think that? And what makes you think it has to be one or the other, rather than a combination?
I mostly miss people retroactively. When I see someone again after a long separation, I might get emotional. And I get really emotional at the moment of re-separation. But I don't usually feel the pain of their absence during their absence. Apparently (according to adhd-alien) this can be a symptom of ADHD, which I was diagnosed with before I noticed this fact about myself.
I'm not sure how the "loud sounds" one corresponds to a phrase that people commonly use, metaphorically or otherwise.
I confess that the ending is lost on me.
I think if you're describing planecrash as "the single work of fiction for which I most want to avoid spoilers", you probably just shouldn't read any reviews of it or anything about it until after you've read it.
If you do read this review beforehand, you should avoid the paragraph that begins with "By far the best …" (The paragraph right before the heading called "The competence".) That mentions something that I definitely would have considered a spoiler if I'd read it before I read planecrash.
Aside from that, it's hard to answer without knowing what kinds of things you consider spoilers and what you already know about planecrash.
Neither there nor in Cheliax's world are there really any lumbering bureaucracies that do insane things for inscrutable bureaucratic reasons; all the organisations depicted are all remarkably sane. Important positions are almost always filled by the smart, skilled, and hardworking. Decisions aren't made because of emotional outbursts. Instead, lots of agents go around optimising for their goals by thinking hard about them.
(I'm spoiler tagging my entire response to this because I don't know what kinds of spoilers are acceptable in this context and I'd rather err on the side of caution.)
While this paragraph is technically true at its most literal (most of the clauses aren't strictly false), I don't think the overall picture it's painting is quite as applicable to Cheliax as you make it out to be. Most of what we see of Cheliax is how it functions when it has so much to gain from a project that its two most powerful people spend a ridiculous amount of their time personally overseeing or intervening in it, and when the project's success depends on obliging and learning from someone who demands competence and coordination and can't be forced to help them. In other words, we're seeing (a tiny piece of) Cheliax when someone with unprecedented leverage is forcing it to be on its best behaviour. This is not their natural mode. Recall that almost the moment that Keltham and Carissa are both gone, the enterprise essentially falls apart, because the remaining overseers actually aren't all that competent when they don't have Keltham and Carissa around forcing them to restrain their worst foibles or care more about results than method. Indeed, one of Cheliax's major weaknesses is that it actually tends to optimize against people thinking very hard or being honest with themselves, unless they're either so psychopathic or so thoroughly brainwashed that they can think very hard without having any unAsmodean thoughts (or so powerful that no one can punish them for heresy, e.g. Abrogail Thrune).
Don't get me wrong, baseline Cheliax still gets a remarkable amount accomplished for a dystopian hellscape, especially compared to its nearest cultural and geographic peers, which does indeed suggest an unusual amount of competence. But Asmodeanism inherently shoots itself in the foot so much that the text itself devotes a decent word count to Carissa realizing this fact and trying to figure out why. I wouldn't call them "remarkably sane", just more sane than their neighbours, who aren't exactly a high bar.
I've always thought Smullyan missed the mark with this story. I think the epistemologist would have been right (or at least, could have been right, in a very meaningless Technically Correct sort of way) if Frank had started out saying "I think the book is red", because as a matter of fact he didn't truly wholeheartedly think the book was red. But what Frank actually said was "The book seems red to me", which is an entirely different statement and which, no matter how I think about it, seems to me like it ought to cover the state of mind "the book looks for all the world like it's red, but I still have some nagging doubts about whether my perception is accurate, such that I'm not sure I actually believe it's red." I don't know what it could possibly mean for a person to say that something "seems" red to them, if it doesn't cover that situation. (Honestly, the first time I read this story I thought Smullyan himself was very cleverly working up to that point, but I ended up disappointed.)
What was the title before?
The linked PDF has a number of typos (OCR errors, perhaps?). Might be better to link to an Internet Archive version, such as this one (from New Dimensions 3; I can't find The Wind's Twelve Quarters on IA to link to that one).
Why would we stretch the definition of lawyer in such a way? That's not what the word "lawyer" means, either in the dictionary sense or in the sense of how people use the word. And even if you can come up with a reason to stretch it to include all those professions, what makes you think that's what Eliezer was doing?
Dang, I missed seeing this before the solution was posted. And oh dear, it's high-complexity. Oh well, I'll give it a shot anyway!
Edit: Hah, I spent an hour checking one thing (which went nowhere), and then ran out of steam, and now I can no longer resist checking the answer. So much for that 😅 Next time I'll try to check my notifications more often so I see the next one before the answer is up, maybe that'll give me more drive to keep at it.
I normally just read these for fun and make no effort to solve them (I know nothing about data science or data analysis). This time I fooled around with the dataset for about half an hour, and managed to get a small inkling that the Phantom Pummelers disliked Sliminess and maybe liked Corporeality. I feel inordinately proud of myself for that minor achievement. (Full disclosure, I also got some inklings that were wrong, like thinking PP also disliked Hostility.)
Feels weird to be at the end. Looking forward to the next one. Might actually try to solve it, even though I will have absolutely no idea what I'm doing.
A shame that the dataset links don't work anymore :(
Vaarsuvius’ Law (“every trip between plot-relevant locations will have exactly one random encounter”)
I appreciate the Order of the Stick reference!
The other day I bought some quick oats and raisins and dried cranberries, and have been serving myself some very delicious bowls of oatmeal. Thanks, bhauth, for reminding me this exists.
Still, when several individually-questionable pieces of evidence are pointing in one direction, and nothing in particular is pointing in the other, that seems like the correct conclusion. I think the story is probably true.
…Huh? The entire rest of the post gave me the exact opposite impression. It sounds like most of the evidence points to the story being false, while hardly anything points to the story being true. Did I miss something?
Ah, gotcha. Thank you.
Most people's experience with oatmeal has been from one of:
- packets of instant oatmeal that have low-quality cheap flavoring and might have gone stale
- quick-cooking rolled oats without any flavoring
Those are my only experiences with oats, but I like both of those experiences. I love instant oatmeal, and I love quick oats boiled on the stove, though of course in the latter case I have to supply my own flavouring. Even just sugar is enough to make it great. But adding raisins takes it to another level; especially adding them while the oats are still boiling so that they rehydrate a little. Dried cranberries are also great. Sometimes I like to add some apple juice to the pot while the oats are boiling. This narrow range of possibilities is already plenty of variety for my narrow palate; and if I'm already making oatmeal, those additions are basically zero added effort. If I didn't have crippling executive dysfunction, I'd eat quick oats much more often than I actually do. (Unfortunately, the activation energy required to make anything on the stove is more than I usually reach; and I find the microwave to be a poor substitute, not to mention that it doesn't even solve the part that I find aversive, which is measuring out the oats and water. Also, raisins and dried cranberries are expensive.)
You don’t learn it from journals; few journals embrace the Pottery Barn rule, and the process of getting a criticism published, much less a retraction, would put Kafka to shame.
I can't figure out how the Pottery Barn rule is relevant to this sentence.
My favourite way to deal with late assignments is to have the option to not do them in the first place. My psychology professor gave each of us three options: 1) do two assignments that count X%, and have the tests count Y% (default option); 2) do one assignment, and have the tests count proportionally more; 3) do zero assignments, and have the tests count for everything.
My ADHD ass chose the last option, and it was the only course that I scored 100% in.
I might be biased about this approach by the fact that I was the student in this scenario, but I'm willing to bet the professor was also happy with this arrangement, since it meant he had fewer assignments to grade.
That professor also had a policy about grading tests, where if almost everybody got a question wrong, he would drop that question from scoring altogether, but still score it for the few people who got it right, who would thus have the possibility of scoring more than 100% (i.e. 50/49).
He also was the only professor I had who always made sure to upload class materials at least a week before the associated class (if not earlier), and always organized them well and labelled them clearly, and at the beginning of each class gave everyone printouts of that day's PowerPoint to write notes on.
I really, really, really liked that professor.
Ohhhh now I get it. I was about to ask what the point of that scene was!
You can plug it into the Wayback Machine.
several-decades-old network of tunnels build inside of a mountain
built
You paperwork's fine.
Should be "your".
If you were trying to spoiler tag that, it didn't work.
My teacup does has a choice.
Should be "does have"; or just "has" (without "does").
You believes Bayesianism
Should be "believe"
"I am a Jew. If there's one thing I know about this universe it's that there's no such thing as God," said Moses.
Is this a joke I'm not religious enough to understand?
They think a bunch of nerds on the darkweb somehow knows more about this Jining then I do living here and administrating it
Should be "know" and "than"
That's what had bought Alia to the entryway
Probably should be "brought".
My solution for this particular kind of spoiler is to save the links for both stories in a note, make sure the first link's display text doesn't say what it is, and write a warning to not click on it or look at the URL. Given my lag rate on combing through my notes for stuff I've saved for later, I'm pretty much guaranteed to have forgotten where the hell I found the story or why it caught my attention by the time I get to it. It's possibly the only area in my life where procrastination and forgetfulness are my friends.
Also note, we do much worse to children all the time.
Yes, but most of it doesn't happen because approximately everyone in the world got together and shared all their knowledge and thought really hard about it and talked about it and then still decided it was a good idea.
I would be interested to see how this goes if you remove the requirement that B has to be stronger at chess than A. (Which, to my knowledge, is not a requirement of the test as Eliezer posed it, but was introduced in Zane's proposal.) Of course, a B that is weaker than A will be easier to beat, which means a win would prove little; which I assume is why Zane introduced this requirement. But it would also mean a loss would prove more. If B is weaker than both C and A, but A loses anyway thanks to C's deception, that would be much more damning than losing against a B that is natively stronger than A to begin with. Maybe you should run the test both ways? (And maybe not tell A which type of B they're facing?)
Why does B have to be better at chess than A but worse than C? Eliezer's post only specifies that B has to be weaker than C; unless I missed something, it doesn't say they have to be stronger than A.
Are the quotes pulled from the Poor Economics book?
Thanks. Unfortunately that didn't work when I tried it. Edit: Googled it. ">!" in front worked.
But I would be really upset if I didn't read it earlier.
Yeah, I don't blame you! I'm really glad I didn't spoil it for you, and sorry again for being careless.
It took Robutil longer still to consider that perhaps humans (with their current self-awareness) not only need to prioritize their own wellbeing and your friendships
Should be "their friendships", yes?
Oh my gosh, you're absolutely right! My apologies! But now that I'm trying to add them, they're an option that isn't showing up in the editor! Do you know how I can add them?
(And if I spoiled that for you, I'm seriously really really really sorry. I hate spoilers, and I'm always riding people about being too loose with them. I can't believe I did that. Was not thinking. I'm sorry.)
I'm curious how you feel about this response.
it's easier to describe what the results of a complex system should be than to describe how to do it.
Sure, but I'm almost tempted to ask what the point of the AMA was, if he wasn't going to explain how dath ilan actually accomplishes things. (I'm not going to actually ask that, because questions merely asking what dath ilan is like, without asking why or how, are also valuable to ask and answer.)
Many questions were "How does dath ilan avoid and/or solve such-and-such problem?", and often the response was essentially, "We're good at [economics/coordination/etc.] so that doesn't happen in the first place", or "If this problem ever happened in dath ilan everyone would wonder how we could possibly have gotten into that position", or "If this problem started happening everyone would notice and then fix it." And like, that's great for dath ilan, but that doesn't explain how they solve(d) the problem. It not only doesn't answer the question literally at all, it almost feels like a weird form of bragging or showing off. These are genuinely hard problems, that's why they still exist. You can't just reframe them in a way that makes them sound easy and trivial, without actually providing a solution, and expect anyone to be convinced or impressed.
I'm not saying EY should've known the answers to these questions. Like I said, these are hard problems; I don't expect EY to have unique insights. I just feel like it would've been a lot more honest, and less braggy or show-offy, to either not respond to those questions, or to just say "I have no idea how dath ilan managed to achieve these things, because [I am not as smart as dath ilan/I don't know our history/etc.]." (Or at least prepend that to the responses he actually gave.)
Hobbes said, "I don't know what's worse, the fact that everyone's got a price, or the fact that their price is so low."
You don't specify which Hobbes. When I Googled this quote trying to find out, I didn't find any results that didn't trace back to this post. I kept reducing the strictness of the exact wording, and still didn't get any not-this results, until I reduced it to "got a price" and "so low", which turned up basically the same quote, differently worded, on TV Tropes, attributing it to Calvin and Hobbes. I had assumed that might be the source, since I've seen you speak highly of Calvin and Hobbes elsewhere, but I didn't know for sure, and checking ended up being surprisingly difficult. (Not sure which version is misquoted, this one or the TV Tropes one. Possibly both, since the latter only turned up one other source, a Twitter post that might have gotten it from the same place.)
Had to look up what LK-99 is. Now I wonder, was this inspiration for
the supercriminal motive in "aviation is the most dangerous routine activity"?
I'm genuinely puzzled by this sort of hostile reaction to what was really a pretty mild request for gender neutral language/examples. It seems utterly out of proportion to the original comment(s).
His reaction wasn't all that hostile. And a request being mild doesn't make the request reasonable, or make it unreasonable to be annoyed by it.
And using gender neutral language/examples is really easy - much easier than jumping through actual hoops, and probably also easier than writing comments telling people how annoyed you are about their nitpicking. The cost-benefit analysis here seems pretty straightforward.
Not really? This is a baffling take. How does writing one comment about being annoyed by something compare to potentially years of committing to gender-neutral language, not just by using singular "they" (for example), but by replacing entire sentence clauses like "Women will still be alluring" with "The touch of another person's skin will still be wonderfully sensuous" (what??), even when you're obviously writing said sentence to reflect your own sensibilities more than the audience's and the sentence is easily generalizable anyway?
Not to mention that it's the principle of the thing. If you genuinely don't see any good reason why you should do a Thing at all, and perhaps even see some reasons why you shouldn't, it makes little to no difference that the Thing is supposedly "really easy" to do. That doesn't by itself constitute a good reason to do the Thing. (I realize part of conchis's argument against this in the first place is the burden it imposes, but I don't perceive that as their only argument. But even if that was their only argument, it still holds as long as "doing the Thing" is not strictly easier than not doing it. As opposed to only being easier than jumping through hoops.)
Is the problem that you actually think it's illegitimate for people to be bothered by stuff like this?
"Stuff like this" is a very broad category. I'm sure it wasn't deliberate, but you're essentially sneaking in anything vaguely related, including things that are reasonable to get upset about, to make conchis's position look worse.
For my part, I don't think it's illegitimate to be bothered by all "stuff like this"; but I do think it's illegitimate to be bothered by this specific sentence that Emily et al. complained about.
Wanting to be included is illegitimate? Wow.
You're conflating the actual contested issue, "wanting this specific sentence, and perhaps similar sentences in similar contexts, to be gender neutral", with the broader and much less contested issue "wanting to be included". They are not equivalent. I am reminded of some webcomic's (forget which) sly attempt at discrediting people who are against political correctness, by replacing "being PC" with "being nice to people", even though "being nice" is not what political correctness often boils down to in practice, and is rarely what opponents are talking about or why they take issue.
I am a woman too, and I want to be included too. And yet, the sentence "Women will still be alluring" doesn't bother me at all. Because I am not excluded at all by that sentence. The fact that some women seem to perceive being excluded does not imply that this is what's actually happening.
If anything, I feel more excluded by the fact that the sentence was ultimately changed as a result of the complaints of a few women, even though I, also a woman, don't think it should have been changed. Why does my opinion matter less? (I'm not suggesting my perception of being excluded is well-founded, or worthy of demanding remedy; but my point is made either way.)
Not to mention that, just like "being nice", "being inclusive" is not always an imperative or even a reasonable restriction. It often is, but there are times where it isn't.
I guess it's easy to think that things don't matter when they don't systematically affect you personally,
I believe conchis's argument is that the particular sentence under discussion shouldn't affect anyone personally. I'm inclined to agree.
What I think when I run across something like the "women are alluring" statement isn't too similar to d). It's more like: "Women are alluring, ah yes they sure are to many people (possibly even insert a little of b) here). Cool. I hope this isn't one of those people who thinks we aren't good for much else... Hey, you can really tell this post is written by another het guy, can't you? And that he didn't stop to consider any viewpoint other than his own on this particular issue. Not that I blame him particularly, but does this ever get tiring when it happens all the damn time. I wonder if there's anywhere else this guy has forgotten to account for other valid perspectives in this article? What the heck was this piece all about anyway?"
Have you considered that this runaway train of thought might be a you problem, rather than a problem with the sentence? Because that was tiring to read, so I'm sure it must be tiring to think whenever you read a sentence that could plausibly lead to the conclusion that the writer is a guy. From where I stand, the issue seems to be that you didn't stop at that observation (which should be a neutral observation). You went well beyond what can reasonably be gleaned from the sentence, into unnecessary negative speculation ("I hope this isn't one of those people who thinks we aren't good for much else", "he didn't stop to consider any viewpoint other than his own on this particular issue"). Nothing wrong with getting lost in the weeds, but these are your weeds, not the sentence's weeds.
If you could halt that train of thought at "Oh, the writer's probably a guy", and not get lost in the weeds, would there still be a problem with the sentence?
I attribute my distraction entirely to the sense that it was directed at a presumed male audience.
What makes you think the audience factors in at all? I'd think this phrasing would be much more an indication that the writer is male. Why would I feel excluded by someone writing about the world from their own perspective? If I had written this post, I would have written "Men would still be alluring"; and I would have written it that way because I am a woman attracted to men, not because I expect my audience to be mostly women attracted to men.
The view that shattering mysteries reduces their value is very much a result of religion trying to protect itself.
Or perhaps it's the result of this view sometimes being plainly true, as borne out by experience.
I've never been religious, and I've experienced firsthand that it's entirely possible for something to become less beautiful if you understand it better.
I listen to a fair number of Japanese songs. There are songs I have specifically not looked up translations for, because even though the song will still be beautiful either way, there's a unique value in its wordless beauty that will be destroyed if I learn what the lyrics mean. I know this because I've experienced it before, with other songs. Or, in the case of Maximum the Hormone, the meanings of the lyrics are so disconcerting that they are actively harmful to my enjoyment of the otherwise highly enjoyable songs.
Now, maybe this specific example isn't addressing exactly what you mean. But my point is that different people are different, and not everyone is going to have the experience that describing or explaining a phenomenon does nothing to diminish its value.
This was somewhat enlightening, but also frustrating because EY kept sort-of-but-not-quite answering what I perceived as the most pressing or most interesting questions, and a lot of what he did answer was met with a vague "Well we're just better at coordinating so it just works" or "Well we're just better at economics so it just works", without giving the nuts and bolts to actually understand how it works or how it fits together.
In practice, many people need the opposite lesson—many people's locus of control is almost entirely external, and they need to be woken up to their capacity for choice and stop blaming everything on immutable factors.
This presumes that such people are indeed capable of shifting their locus of control, which based on my own personal experience and observations is not always an accurate presumption.