felis-parenthesis
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User ID: 660
felis-parenthesis
7mo ago
That essay (I found an online copy) is a fascinating insight into intellectual history. It has stood the test of time well and one may read modern ideas written in the language of one hundred and fifty years ago
We know, further, that the lower animals possess, though less developed, that part of the brain which we have every reason to believe to be the organ of consciousness in man; and as, in other cases, function and organ are proportional, so we have a right to conclude it is with the brain; and that the brutes, though they may not possess our intensity of consciousness, and though, from the absence of language, they can have no trains of thoughts, but only trains of feelings, yet have a consciousness which, more or less distinctly, foreshadows our own.
I confess that, in view of the struggle for existence which goes on in the animal world, and of the frightful quantity of pain with which it must be accompanied, I should be glad if the probabilities were in favour of Descartes’ hypothesis; but, on the other hand, considering the terrible practical consequences to domestic animals which might ensue from any error on our part, it is as well to err on the right side, if we err at all, and deal with them as weaker brethren, who are bound, like the rest of us, to pay their toll for living, and suffer what is needful for the general good. As Hartley finely says, “We seem to be in the place of God to them;” and we may justly follow the precedents He sets in nature in our dealings with them
I see two directions in which one may wish to update the thinking. The first is in response to GPT-4. If there is to be no limit to the intricacy of mechanisms and the smallness of their parts, there is then no limit to the number of their parts. We may foresee all of consciousness, even its most elevated applications, swallowed up by the concept of mechanism. We are all, in every way, machines or automata. The concept of being a machine or an automaton lacks boundaries. It does not reproduce the boundaries that we believe to be important and is thus revealed to be a weak and unhelpful concept.
The second is in response to computer viruses, and the possibility, in a world of insecure computers, of a free living virus. It circulates in the computer network, thinking and changing itself, but also subject to copying error and natural selection. It constitutes a form of life, but living in an artificial and constructed realm; that of the copying of information and the running of programs. But we humans copy information and if we are automata, we are sophisticated ones that download and run programs. So our mind-viruses/meme-complexes/egregores also constitute a form of life, but living in the artificial realm of human culture, that some call the noosphere.
if Culture is directed by stigmergy rather than conspiracy that has implications which are far too important to ignore.
Perhaps grass is to rabbits as humans are to egregores. We are the grass on which the egregores graze.
Or perhaps rabbits are to foxes as humans are to egregores. We are the meat on which the egregores feast. But without hope of organizing a defence.
Or perhaps humans are to tigers as humans are to egregores. We are the meat on which the egregores feast. But the creatures are not beyond our understanding and we may organize defenses.
felis-parenthesis
8mo ago
Scott wrote an interesting post about heavy psychedelic use was making people weird https://slatestarcodex.com/2016/04/28/why-were-early-psychedelicists-so-weird/ In addition to the sites own comments, it was discussed on HackerNews https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16386406
Notice the comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16402462 about the cozy-weird.
I've maintained an interest in the topic, despite my own, youthful dalliance being forty years ago. So I read https://old.reddit.com/r/RationalPsychonaut/ Perhaps I still dream of opening the doors of perception and ripping away the veil of illusion to see reality. But I notice that today's psychonauts have little success. I had no success myself last century and my friends insisted that psychedelics were just for fun; there were no deep truths to be discovered that way. More troubling is the posts asking for help to recover from the lingering after effects of bad trips. Such posts meet with sympathy, but little practical help. There are rather too many for my taste, and problems seem to arise somewhat at random. Yes, heroic doses often lead to trouble, but small doses are not entirely safe. And having tasted the forbidden fruit, the curious often return for a larger bite, and bite off more than they can chew. Had I read those anecdotes as a young man, they would have put me off experimenting.
I want to return to the concept of the cozy-weird. I don't want my mind opened so that I can see the out-there-weird. I've no faith in the value of the out-there-weird. But I do want to open my mind so that I can look at the cozy-weird and see the weirdness of it. I doubt that psychedelics help. One route is to study statistics and logic and spot pervasive bad reasoning; that provides loose threats to pull on, unraveling the veil of illusion and exposing the weirdness behind the ordinary. Another route is Buddhist meditation practices. Cultivate noticing ones emotional responses and how the defense mechanisms of the mind keep you socially safe by not letting you see the weirdness of the cozy-weird. I think that there is more than enough weirdness in the cozy-weird to let you escape from your straightlaced life. There is no need to go down the route of psychedelics and out-there-weirdness.
felis-parenthesis
9mo ago
My favourite example of the main stream media getting it wrong in a non-controversial matter is from the British national newspaper, the Telegraph. http://web.archive.org/web/20160418170258/http://www.cawtech.freeserve.co.uk/telegraph.2.html
The mistake is to say that Uranium has a high weight to mass ratio. At 9.81 Newtons per Kilogram, the unfamiliar units make the number seem large (isn't water just one Newton per Kilogram?) Then one realises that the weight to mass ration of Uranium is 9.81 meters per second squared, the same as everything else on the surface of the Earth. There are no limits to the errors of journalists.
felis-parenthesis
1yr ago
You've got to mention Walter Lippmann and his 1922 book Public Opinion
That makes it 101 years, justifying the full century rhetoric :-)
felis-parenthesis
1yr ago
I'm a lurking volunteer. I just had https://www.themotte.org/post/317/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/54744?context=8#context given to me to rate. I felt a three way conflict.
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It is a superb piece of satire, obviously good.
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I'm satired-out. There is a lot of satire on the internet. Too much, give me a break. Gut says: puke!
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I like the https://www.themotte.org/rules#Disagreement rule, which the comment is breaking. That should be a warning.
I went with "bad". The instruction do say go with your gut.
I think that the disagreement rule is a good rule that we should uphold, partly for the stated reason, partly for my point 2. It might be easier for the volunteers to uphold it if there were a button with a label that was the terse version of "Brilliantly funny sarcasm, but bad, because brilliantly funny sarcasm is fentanyl for discussion."
felis-parenthesis
1yr ago
Retaining my Reddit handle (defparameter *fur-name* "felis-parenthesis" "the cat who codes in Common Lisp")
felis-parenthesis
1mo ago
My thoughts meandered to a financial analogy, prompted by the phrase "zero lower bound". One sees the phrase "zero lower bound" in the context of macroeconomics and interest rates. Governments like to stimulate the economy by cutting interest rates, but once they are cut to zero, they cannot go any lower. They have reached the zero lower bound.
Ordinary men have a similar problem with reducing the amount of rape they do. They are on board with the message "Don't rape" and would like to help women by raping less, but they are already at the zero lower bound. To do less, they would have to find a way to go negative and unrape. Ordinary men just aren't in charge and cannot actually do anything, just like ordinary men dislike money printing and inflation, but aren't consulted and cannot say "No!".
felis-parenthesis
1mo ago
felis-parenthesis
2mo ago
I prefer a zoomed in view of religious technology in which the details are subtle and difficult to get right. There are interesting thoughts in a post to /r/neology claiming that Islam and Marxism are both examples of a certain kind of thing, more specific than religion or ideology (and asking r/neology to invent a word for it)
The central text must hit
the sweet spot in the vague/clear trade-off for maxim memetic potentency.
Look at how revered and celebrated texts work socially. They need to be clear enough to provide rallying cries and ideals that are solid enough for people to get behind them. They need to be clear enough that it seems legitimate to punish people for breaking the rules or disputing the teachings. And yet such clarity is the other side of the coin from rigidity.
A revered and celebrated text can only live a long life if it has a certain amount of vagueness. When times change, society needs new meanings. If the text is amended, the process scrubs off the patina of age, and invites further amendment. The text should have enough wiggle room for re-interpretation without literal change. A text also need powerful defenders to promulgate it and censor rival texts. The text must meet their needs. Their varying needs. The text should have enough wiggle room for those with power to re-interpret it to their advantage.
So I agree with you that the religious technology works by insisting that the text is 100% true and cannot be altered. But that is a tricky constraint.
felis-parenthesis
3mo ago
I think that the rotation of roles does help a little. The blue electors may well treat with the white princes, saying "I'll give you the crown if you give me X". On the other hand, the big prize is that one of the blue elector's children will go on to become king. Can they do a trade for the big prize? Can blue electors say to white princes "I'll make you king, if you make my son king in turn" ? No! When the white king dies (or perhaps demits the throne due to an age limit) it is the blue line that supplies the princes, but it is the red line that supplies the electors/kingmakers. Picking a blue electors' son as heir is beyond the power of the white king and beyond the power of the white line.
Perhaps blue electors can treat with members of the red line. "Promise to make my son king, and I'll give you the white king that you desire." But the members of the red line will have to have a deal set up whereby the white king pays them back. Complicated deals in smoke filled back rooms are certainly a thing, but now timing gets in the way. The blue electors are talking to members of the red line, but the election of the blue king is perhaps thirty years down the line; it is the children of the members of the red line who need to be trusted to keep the bargain.
Perhaps the Rotating Triple Crown fails because it depends too much on people believing in it. If the blue line believe that the kingdom will last, they may chose a good white king in the hope that their son inherits a thriving kingdom. But if belief falters, then the blue electors will sell the crown for a prompt reward, preferring to cash out and loot a system that they think is failing.
felis-parenthesis
3mo ago
The Rotating Triple Crown is mainly an attempt to design a rule of succession that solves the problem of the stupid eldest son. One reason why a king might lack iron-clad legitmacy is that he took the crown as part of an ad hoc modification to the succession rules when the legitimate eldest son is seen as unacceptably stupid. The other side of this coin is when such an attempt at ad hoc modification fails, and the legitimate eldest son ends up lacking legitimacy because no-one wants to be ruled by an idiot. To the extent that the Rotating Triple Crown does actually solve the problem of the stupid eldest son (with its very limited use of election) it also eliminates two possible causes of a failure of legitimacy.
There is a third indirect boost to legitimacy
The descendents of the Blue King meet to choose a new King from among the White princes. When, in the fullness of time, the White King dies, the descendents of the Red King will meet to choose a new King from among the Blue Princes. The cycle continues with the each King succeeded by a prince of the next colour chosen by a conclave of KingMakers, all of the previous colour.
The blue kingmakers are choosing a White king. Presumably they are also looking ahead to when a member of their own, blue, line ascends to the throne. Therefore, they have an incentive to select as White king, some-one with a responsible attitude to the long term future of the kingdom; some-one who will fix problems, rather than leave them to fester and become a challenge for the next blue king.
The Rotating Triple Crown is attractive world-building for an alternative history science fiction novel set in a world with twentieth century technology, but still having executive monarchies. The world-building gifts the author an explanation for how executive monarchy has managed to survive. It also lets the author write competence porn. The kings are shrewd and effective, because the kingmakers chose shrewd effective kings, not because the author wrote them that way.
felis-parenthesis
5mo ago
It is not the exact same argument; you are missing a scale factor.
Imagine that a collection of nation-states has free movement within each state, and restrictions on movements between states. What works best? A world with 8 huge countries, each with a billion inhabitants, or a world with 800 small countries, each with 10 million inhabitants? Scale matters and there is something real to discuss. It is not the exact same argument at the different scales. There may well be a right size for a country, with strong borders and free movement inside.
felis-parenthesis
11mo ago
Watering my grass seed every day and seeing it germinate. Newly sprouted grass is a particular shade of green (joyful green?) that lifts my spirits.
felis-parenthesis
11mo ago
We have a rule against sarcasm. One advantage of adhering to the rule is that it imposes an intellectually interesting exercise.
Write a sarcastic comment. Remember the rule. Now what?
You can start over and write the comment directly. The story goes: err, actually I'm not touching that story, I'm all sarcasmed out
Giving up on the particulars, sarcasm generally works as a cognitive tax. Enough effort gets wasted on the inversion, writing as well as reading, that little is left over to notice dangling threads. One creates/latches-on-to the opposite meaning to become one of the in crowd that makes/gets the sarcasm, and one misses the telling details that are worth exploring.
felis-parenthesis
1yr ago
I struggle to intuit the tone of this comment, but even if it is facetious, I see it as a pithy portal to profundity. I believe in long term social dynamics and think that the world works something like this parable:
One day there is a religious revival and the Church of Universal Love grows big. Young people flock to its message of unconditional kindness and charity. They marry and have children. Thirty years on those children are the new crop of adults. They are unconditionally kind and full of charity; it was how they were brought up. And thirty years on a new grift culture emerges to take advantage of them.
Sixty years on from the religious revival sees another new crop of adults. They look at their parents with dismay: how can intelligent people so lack street smarts? Why do they fall for every scam and grift? I picture @RococoBasilica as one of this second generation, looking back on sixty years of history and noticing the earlier parts of the causal chain leading to the rise of grift culture.
felis-parenthesis
1mo ago
It has come to a point where I have to face an awkward alternative: Either most people I know are wrong (including learned men and experts) or I am insane.
I'm going to treat this as a request for an explanation of what is going on in the heads of the learned men and experts.
They are trapped in a language game, made toxic by linguistic poverty. My explanation will involve coining two neologisms and deploying them in a two stage explanation.
semi-grift Contrasts with the existing word grift. Grifters get prosecuted. But some grift-like enterprises do more good than harm. Even when individual practitioners do more harm than good, they still don't get prosecuted, because society doesn't want the chilling effect on the others, doing more good than harm and producing (in the case of psychiatry) a very substantial net benefit. Call those pro-social grifts semi-grifts.
turbo-real Are bricks real? Drop one on your foot and the pain will tell you: Yes, absolutely real! Are centers of gravity real? Put your brick on the table with the center of gravity over the edge. When it falls off and lands on your foot, the pain will tell you, err, what exactly? The center of gravity is too abstract to be absolutely real, yet the pain insists that centers of gravity are of such practical importance that they could only be one degree less real: turbo-real.
stage one The vocabulary of the elite includes semi-grift and turbo-real. You ask a member of the elite whether psychopathology exists. You persist. Eventually, when you are both naked in the hot tub, he decides that you are not wearing a wire, and the noise of the bubbles and water jets will hide the conversation from prying microphones. He levels with you: psychiatry is a semi-grift, psychopathology is not turbo-real.
Why the precautions? He explains that if he is overhead saying "psychopathology is not turbo-real" the normie eaves dropper will look up turbo-real in the elite-to-normie dictionary and find that it means that psychopathology does not exist. Then the normie eaves dropper will translate the other way. Since the normie term "exist" smushes together both turbo-real and semi-grift, translating back to elite speak from exist also hits semi-grift. Psychopathology is not even a semi-grift, it must be a grift, it must be banned and grifters prosecuted. Your elite informant is terrified of the disaster that would be caused and that is why he is so cagey. end of stage one
Now we must confront the impossibility the conversation above. semi-grift and turbo-real are my neologisms. No-one can give you the answer above because they don't have those words.
stage two In reality the elite suffer the same linguistic poverty as the normies. They have only one word, exist, which they decorate with elaborate qualifiers, hoping to distinguish strong forms of existence, such as being turbo-real, from weak-forms of existence, such as being merely a semi-grift. They know that their single word conceals a real distinction, that they grasp towards. They know that the stakes are high and being misunderstood by normies would be a disaster. Fearing that their struggle to be understood correctly might fail, they clam up.
This is where you end up bashing your head against a brick wall. The learned men and experts are surely clever enough to see that psychopathology is not turbo-real (though you use the word exist). But they will not come out and say it. Sometimes they fob you off by saying "Of course psychopathology exists" but that only adds to your confusion, because you can read people well enough to tell that they don't really mean it (or don't exactly mean it, or don't fully mean it, or something; there is definitely something hidden and wrong). The experts hear your questions. They smell disaster in the air. They don't have the words to articulate the actual difficulty, so they clam up, leaving you doubting your sanity. end of stage two
felis-parenthesis
2mo ago
I believe that prohibition works less well than its mainstream advocates expect. I think the gap is huge. Mainstream advocates of prohibition never grasp how poorly it works and never admit the extent of the problems. Within the constraints of Western Morality (you cannot just take the addicts out and shoot them) the problems are unfixable, we didn't merely do a bad job of it.
On the other hand I notice a fatal flaw in my reasoning. I assume, based on pure optimism, that there is a good solution to the problems of substance abuse. I see that prohibition works very badly. Legal permissiveness is an alternative. I have my unjustified axiom that there is a solution, so I hope that legal permissiveness is that solution and does actually work. This is embarrassingly silly. In general terms nothing prevents legal permissiveness from being an even worse disaster than prohibition.
Of course the details of the particular substance in question are decisive. Legal permissiveness works very well for coffee, but it might turn out to be a mega-death disaster for fentanyl.
felis-parenthesis
2mo ago
You have misplaced the decimal point. 112000/3500000 = 0.032 which is 3.2%
felis-parenthesis
5mo ago
Fauci managed to do his gain of function research under the nose of both the US government and the Chinese government and they didn't stop him. The US government wanted to stop him, gain of function research was forbidden in the USA, which is why he had to send money to China to do it there. I'm pretty sure that the Chinese government would have stopped him if they had been keeping up with the technology and realized the stakes.
He managed it by being high-ranking insider. Applying that insight to "secretly develop a fleet of autonomous killer robots", if you are an insider working for DARPA, the Pentagon will help you keep it secret. The top people are politicians in the Joe Biden electoral sense. The level below that are politicians in the bureaucratic maneuvering sense. If you are the highest ranking technologist, who understands the details of the authorization mechanisms that confer control of the killer swarm, you are exposed to serious temptation.
felis-parenthesis
6mo ago
Help! I'm old and not keeping up
you don't join
Who is you and what do they not join?
into the pit with the rest of us
Who is us? What is the pit?
felis-parenthesis
10mo ago
It's a well-known property of correlation that it's not transitive in general.
See https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/vfb5Seaaqzk5kzChb/when-is-correlation-transitive
felis-parenthesis
1mo ago
This reminds me of my puzzlement at the reception of Thomas Hobbes' Leviathan. I imagined that English politics in 1651 had a right-wing that favoured monarchy and the divine right of kings, and a left-wing, that favoured Parliament, diggers and levelers, and if the diggers and levelers got too rambunctious, a Lord Protector. I further imagined that the right-wing would love Hobbes. Why? Because they would notice that a mystical faith in the divine right of kings wasn't persuading everybody. Some persons had a more mechanistic, materialist take on how politics worked, and Hobbes' reasoning, about needing a king to maintain order, would persuade them, perfecting social harmony as both the pious and the mechanistic/materialists agreed on the need for a king.
I was wrong. Quoting wikipedia "The secularist spirit of his book greatly angered both Anglicans and French Catholics" and "Hobbes was terrified at the prospect of being labelled a heretic, and proceeded to burn some of his compromising papers." The divine right of kings was a mystical doctrine and one profaned it by offering worldly justification.
So yes, the rightist mind finds the enigmatic, such as monarchy, beautiful. The tiny minority of rightist (just me?) who distrust enigma and construct mechanistic/materialists accounts of why we should be right-wing are rejected by the right. And then there is the left, which offers mechanistic/materialist accounts of why we should be left-wing (that I find unconvincing due to neglecting the details of the mechanisms).
felis-parenthesis
1mo ago
The answer to your hypothetical is already in the constitution under Article V.
The governance issue is choosing the venue for public policy debates. Perhaps the policy issue is whether to have an exception to the first amendment for anti-social speech. The trade-off is that if the government gets to decide what is "anti-social speech" the ruling party will attempt to consolidate power by declaring that the opposing party's talking points are "anti-social speech" and banning them.
The constitution currently goes 100% on not letting the government consolidate power by limiting speech, and 0% on banning novels and films that celebrate degenerate anti-heroes. Is that the right trade off? Maybe. I'm not sure about the policy issue. But the governance issue seems clear enough, the public policy discussion takes place in a constitutional convention, not the Supreme Court. That might seem obvious. If the Supreme Court balances public policy trade-offs themselves, that replaces the Republic with a Kritarchy.
But there is a second, more subtle issue. Contemplate the likely arguments in a constitutional convention. There will be those who are sick of the mass media pushing degenerate narratives and wish to grant the government broad powers against "anti-social speech". There will be those who are terrified of the dangers of such powers and want a narrow amendment that only grants congress the power to ban speech that advocates shoplifting and porch-piracy.
Let us suppose that it is the narrow amendment that is passed. Congress decides that calls for reparations are in really just a nudge and a wink for shoplifting and bans it also. Those who advocate for reparations sue, claiming that there remaining free speech right are being violated. Do they get to have their case heard by an independent tribunal? The traditional idea is that the Supreme Court is that independent tribunal. The constitutional convention thrashed out a deal. Yes to restricting speech, but narrowly. Who upholds the deal? The Supreme Court.
What is supposed to happen if the Supreme Court is debating and making the trade-off? One idea is to have a Super-Supreme-Court. Once the Supreme Court has decided that some speech restriction are permitted, who hears cases claiming that speech restrictions are too restrictive? The Super-Supreme-Court! But this is getting silly. On the other hand, if the case is hear by the Supreme Court itself, does it hear the case as though its previous ruling were carved in stone, or does it revisiting the issue, acting as free-wheeling kritarchy that makes it up as it goes along. What a mess!
felis-parenthesis
2mo ago
I thought that terrible wars, leaving society short of men, were common in history. Indeed, I thought that was the origin story of polygamy in Islam. The followers of Mohammad had lost too many men waging Jihad. Sticking with monogamy would leave women without husbands and slow down rebuilding the population of warriors. So Mohammad declared that a man could have up to four wives.
The birth rate remains 50:50 (Is it actually 51% boys, 49% girls? I think it is not exactly 50:50, with some built-in compensation for slightly different death rates) so it is not exactly your hypothetical. Worse, I'm talking about societies very different to our own, so it is hard to know the relevance of the comparision.
I think I muddle together various issues
the inaccessibility of truth. I never get to the real truth, but there is wide variation in how hard I try and how close I get.
fear of the future. Will it be A or B? I make my choice. It turns out to be C.
Should I pursue "Epistemic Rationality" and seek the truth just because it is true. That is a reckless path that probably leads to nihilism, despair, and suicide. Not a good idea.
Should I tackle the problem above by being more pragmatic? I could compromise the concept of truth by asking "is this true for me" where I'm sneaking in the idea that things can be true because they make me happy or help me cope.
But the two paragraphs above get greatly modified when I contemplate that I'm not actually getting close to the truth, sometimes because it is hard to find, sometimes because I slack off and don't really try. Since I'm not actually getting close to the truth, the stuff that I believe to be true doesn't stand the test of time. My pragmatic approach fails because times change and the things I believed would make me happy and help me cope, turn out to make me sad and become new problems to be coped with.
My attempts at "Epistemic Rationality" fail twice. No God, no joy, no hope. I buy my rope and my bucket. But this first failure is followed by a second failure. I don't believe that I have gotten to the bottom of things. What if I'm wrong? What new horror will 2024 bring? Disabled by doubt, I fail to kick the bucket. I wait with anxious curiosity to find how how I was wrong this time.
I lean more towards "Epistemic Rationality" because I hope that the things that I accept as true will be closer to the truth and hence last longer. I guess that it is easier to come up with coping strategies for unpleasant truths that last, than it is to cope with the endless churn of pragmatic truths that don't last.
tldr: my version of pragmatism is a shoddily constructed thing that wobbles, breaks, and falls over.
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