alexvr's comments

Just a friendly reminder that morality is just a little human social construct associated with the pain-pleasure mechanism that evolved to guide intelligent machines toward evolutionarily advantageous ends. It's not a fundamental "problem" or anything if someone dies or suffers unthinkable agony. It's just that collections of molecules that avoid these things tend to survive. Outside of silly little human opinions, you're not a "bad person" if you stab people with scissors for fun, and you're not a "good person" if you cure cancer. These are both just "happenings" of nature, nothing more than what they are. Please don't waste your time pondering ethical dilemmas because it's as silly as arguing about the location of the garden of Eden or whether the population of leprechauns is greater than the population of unicorns.

Thanks for the comment. I have to disagree with burning cat paws being unarguably immoral, unless you're talking about a completely fabricated, cognitive, social definition of morality. If you declare, rather arbitrarily, that anything causing pain intentionally for no good reason is in our discussion referred to as "bad" or "immoral," I will agree that burning cat paws is immoral. But that's just a definition we invented; in reality there's no issue with burning cat paws for fun or cutting your fingers off when they get dirty or shooting rockets at the tailgater behind your car. Yeah there's going to be pain involved, but there's nothing fundamentally wrong with pain at all.

I'm glad. They are disturbing thoughts at first but then they become profoundly liberating.

The "self" or "ego" is an illusion. It's very challenging to see beyond it when you're raised in the competitive, egocentric America. It's not at all obvious until it hits you.

I'm of course not saying that bodies and brains don't exist, just that they are only subjectively and almost arbitrarily separated from Nature. For example, outside of opinions, people are no more significant as entities than, say, doors. Can't doors be considered walls? Sure; it's an opinion, a name for a fuzzily-defined feature of the world. It's not a special entity in a computer system. Same with "person": It's just a name for a concept we have. It's arbitrarily defined. You could just as easily create a new word, like "personite," and define it to mean what we normally think of as a "person" plus everything in a 10-ft-radius sphere from their nose. It's just like "solar system" - it's almost arbitrarily defined. There's not a hidden sphere delineating solar systems just like there's not a hidden mesh delineating our bodies. We just approximately agreed on these definitions. It's also just like the notion of "alive": there's not a cosmic Boolean keeping track of whether or not an aspect of nature is alive or not; "life" is just a concept we invented, almost arbitrarily defined. As I see it, we're always "dying" in a sense: Are you really the person you were this morning? Can you have a conversation with him? I'm pretty sure he's gone, or in a position along the dimension of time that we can't access from this point in time. The idea that you're in some way the same "person" is an illusion of memory: It's just that a very similar brain has memories of what it was like to experience the world in a very similar body this morning.

So yeah, the thing "my body" refers to certainly exists, but it's not some kind of separate or significant "entity" except within our opinionated minds, perhaps; it's just "what the Cosmos is doing in that general area."

I think it's obvious that there's also nothing wrong with thinking that nonexistent things are fundamental aspects of reality. You (not you specifically) can have mental models that are not in line with reality to your heart's content. It's not a problem. Trees and rocks don't know what's going on either.

It's NOT objectively wrong to hurt people on a whim! I concede this very easily. It's not dubious whatever. It might be illegal or make you unhappy, but please let me know why this is objectively wrong. Do you think "wrong" is more than a little human symbol referring to a little human opinion? How does hurting someone violate nature? How is it a problem? Are there invisible arrows that point to "bad" things? Do you actually think pain is a fundamental problem? What's "dubious" is thinking there's such thing as an objective "bad" out there somewhere. Go find it and take a picture. Measure it and please document it for the human scientific enterprise because it would be a fascinating (but very disturbing) discovery! I'm not trying to be mean here - I just want more people to realize this. Our society is brainwashed. Nothing matters whatsoever outside of pure opinion, as far as we know. Wake up, people.

It's not wrong to stick a gun in someone's face. It's fine to pull the trigger too, if you're not considering the laws our civilization invented. It's all just opinion: You might not like being robbed, shot, or killed, but that's your opinion; it's not "bad" in any real way whatsoever. I don't like pain or the idea of dying before I'm ready either, but it's not an actual problem or anything like that. Just preference. It would be quite remarkable to somehow violate the way things are. Next time you see someone do something "wrong," or "bad," or "unethical," please try to use your senses to observe the "bad" or "problem" in the situation. Where is it? I'd love to see a picture of a real violation of nature, a real problem.

To your second question, such things are annoying to me because it is my nature to be annoyed by ignorance. Many humans are naturally compelled to seek understanding. There is nothing wrong with ignorance; it's just my nature to find it annoying.

Also, downvoting my comments doesn't make them incorrect.

A class on moral philosophy screwed me up for a while early in college. All the critical thinking and fancy vocabulary about the topic made me think morality was in some way real - I was all concerned about violating "moral laws." It's amazing how smart people can be so grossly deluded and incorrect about things like this.

"Am I wasting my potential?! Is this action maximizing my contribution to general welfare?! Is Famous Person better than me because he helped more people?!" Totally neurotic.

This kicked off an era of serious philosophizing, and I began to see countless contradictions and paradoxes with utilitarianism, etc.

For example, I started to see that the notion of "selfhood" was just a social invention or cognitive construct, because I reasoned that we're just perpetually changing aspects of nature, and our separateness is just opinion. So then I wondered how the hell anyone could be deserving of blame or credit if they don't actually exist, or if it was their "former self" who committed the crime, etc.

It's kind of annoying but cute to see some popular "thinkers" and writers -- fancy-smarty-pants _neuroscientists_ and _atheists_, even -- who actually think morality is real, as though there are actual objective problems out there somewhere. As though you could actually do a "bad thing" or a "good thing." That grinds my gears a little because it's very hypocritical: They'll write an entire book disparaging religious people who believe things without evidence, and they'll write another book on why, according to their pseudoscientific-philosophical horse shit, morality can be "derived from science" [vomit].

But it's easy for smart people to cling to morality as an existential anchor point when they don't have religion to fall back on. It's hard to accept that you're in free fall. But it's nice once you come around and accept reality for what it is.

Remind me how the correlation between openness to experience and IQ test scores suggests that seeking novelty might possibly increase your cognitive potential. I think I missed that part. With the same kind of "reasoning" I might have to write an article claiming that you should take lots of psychoactive drugs and have more sex to increase your cognitive potential, because there are positive correlations between these things and IQ scores. Also, if you want to get smarter, listen to the bands on the right of this chart! http://musicthatmakesyoudumb.virgil.gr/ ...why? Because correlations, of course! Much scientificful.

What? Why doesn't it work like this:

Cell phones have SIM cards with an ID and a secret key. Cell service providers have a database of these SIM associations. Cell phones encrypt IP packets in their entirety with the symmetric key and send it as the payload of some cell protocol packet that might expose my ID, if anything. Assuming the cell provider is secure and not on the dark side, this is the safest part of my my packet's trip.

I don't understand how a cell-site simulator could see what websites I visit, much less the messages I send, without knowing my key. And it's not like one could trick my phone into thinking it's the actual cell site, because it won't be able to respond to my transmission with a message that my key can decrypt.

What the heck am I missing?

I find this deeply disturbing, particularly because there has never been a better time in recent history to NOT give a damn about how you perform in traditional school systems, if you are unlucky or ignorant enough to be imprisoned in one in the first place. Competitive anxiety is one thing when it compels people to achieve amazing things, and another entirely when it clouds judgment and makes people miserable and on edge so they can merely out-compete the next person, even if the entire competition is largely just a contrived and futile ego game to begin with. People should first think long and hard about why they are striving for whatever it is they are stressing over.

But the truly disturbing thing is that traditional schools still exist, and a frightening number of people -- even some smart people! -- still consider the system humane and somehow necessary. I sometimes can't believe that my younger self was effectively forced to do push-ups, run laps, eat lunch in a crowded cafeteria (that is, navigate the social landscape as someone with anxiety), and memorize court cases, poems, and Greek column types because some older person decided that it was good for me. Because overall it wasn't, and the reason I managed to finish K-12 as a reasonably educated human being instead of a sheep is that I realized the contrived nature of traditional education very early -- like, second grade -- and placed actual education (and, maybe unfortunately, silly but outrageously fun MMORPGs) above “school for the sake of grades”. I learned a lot from school, and even plenty from coursework, but I can hardly imagine the superior human I might be had I been allowed to focus on my personal interests and learn at my own pace.

School is a really bad place for smart kids. It’s disgusting. For every would-be gang member or fry cook who turns out significantly better because he was forced to attend school, there are probably many thousands of bright young people who would much rather be inventing something, experimenting, productively socializing, or studying what they find interesting. If I do one meaningful thing in my life, it will be helping to make that the norm. It’s really a sad thing that some kids with plenty of potential are misguided into thinking that a GPA is more important than knowledge, experience, curiosity, and comprehension. And it’s an atrocity that staggeringly gifted young people can grow up thinking they’re poorly endowed weirdos because, instead of memorizing their way through school, they struggle to actually understand things since their minds refuse to take “that’s just how it works” for an answer, and they bother to "waste time" wondering, "What if...?"

There are far more humane ways to criminally detract from the most important years of young American lives, if that’s the goal of compulsory education.

By the time kids who are taught to program in K-12 enter the workforce, knowing syntax, computer details, and data structures will be a thing of the past or a thing for really hardcore engineers who have to use a strict language like Python. By that time, most common programming tasks will be a matter of writing plain English and testing the AI interpreters, and students will be stuck learning archaic programming just as they are presently forced to learn archaic and impractical math techniques that could be done very intuitively with a few lines of Python and arithmetic. I say this jokingly, but there may be some truth to it.

I hope he gets out of this rut and finds a way to be happy and do more good things. It's a little painful to watch a smart guy with billions spend his time making gimmicky video games and partying and being generally unhappy.

Thanks for the warning. I was really hoping to see Halo or Quake or something, because in my experience practicing these games in a casual-competitive way, I hit a performance ceiling. In high school I played Halo nearly every day, and a bright friend of mine, who didn't even own the game, was a surprisingly good player for his limited experience.

On a similar note, I once read that reaction time and IQ are correlated (not sure how strongly), which is interesting because you might expect motor functions like that to be orthogonal to higher-order cognitive abilities.

Actually, most algebraic tricks in calculus, which are what make it challenging, are pretty unnecessary to know if you can program a computer or use existing math software. Conceptual tricks, on the other hand, which might be more aptly called "conceptual applications," should be understood and derived. The unfortunate thing is that many students get so accustomed to memorizing tricks that would indeed require really advanced math abilities and lots of time to derive that they gloss over valuable concepts that they should actually understand very well.

I don't know what a gerund is, and I've never needed to except in 8th grade grammar tests, which I failed. Yet I got a 79/80 on the writing section of the SAT because my grammar is pretty solid. I've been in a remedial English class, actually, with ESL kids. Like yourself and most other rational people, I am a big proponent of acquiring knowledge on diverse topics. I just think people should be able to pursue the topics they're interested in instead of dealing with distracting busywork that old people decided was a good fundamental curriculum. Do you fail to see the problem with schools forcing kids to memorize things about Native Americans and Greek columns and long division (etc.) when 1) most do not care about such things and 2) even more will never need to know such things? It's one problem to have an outdated curriculum and another to force a set curriculum, even a great one that works really well for the average student, on kids.

First, these are all exaggerated cases, inspired by experience. I appreciate the infrastructure a great deal, but I'm saying that there's a tremendous amount you can do if you focus on learning concepts and have a computer. School doesn't even care if you understand concepts; memorization is usually sufficient. And anyone who understands basic conceptual 1-var calculus and programming can indeed easily write functions in plain C that perform numerical integration and derivation because the hard part about calculus is putting up with the countless algebra tricks that are not obvious to mortals. Don't know how to manipulate that monstrous algebraic expression to take the limit? Good thing your computer can use some tiny floats. People who are not going to be math/physics professors or NASA physicists who need to plan a Mars voyage to the nearest nanometer would really benefit from focusing on the concepts instead of algebra. And my calculus teachers were pretty superb, by the way.

It's really sad, but in one way kind of laughable, to see so many ostensibly bright students wasting their time cramming useless crap into their brains for AP history and calculus tests, and doing socially acceptable "extracurricular activities," all so they can get into socially acceptable or "impressive" universities where they can pay obscene tuitions and try to figure out what they want to do with life. Compulsory K-12 education is really bad for smart students who know what they love to do and what they're good at, because it's a massive, needlessly competitive distraction. Not all smart kids need to learn the details of calculus or chemistry or history, it turns out, because not all smart kids want to be math professors or biochemists or historians! Who woulda thought?!

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Oh, you're a talented young engineer? You can write a program in 3 minutes to approximate nearly any integral? Fuck you, we don't even teach programming in high school. In fact, such witchcraft is prohibited here. Instead, spend half a year of your life memorizing these integration tricks because we're definitely still in the 19th century. Speaking of which, don't forget that you have a big history project due tomorrow because you will no doubt be required to distinguish between Greek column types when you're in the real world!

Oh, you have a natural gift for writing? Too bad you don't know what a gerund or past participle is! You must be dumb! Let me tell you: In the real world, it is imperative that you be capable of diagramming sentences. Yes, you deserve to fail grammar tests even if your grammar is impeccable in practice.

Oh, you taught yourself conceptual aerospace engineering in elementary school? Fuck you and your creativity and advanced knowledge; you must follow directions to the point in engineering class to build this cardboard rocket! Engineering is all about following directions!

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Yeah, I've seen some nasty things in school.

I hope I see the day when students don't feel pressured to learn things just to make the grade or "keep up" with the fierce competition. Maybe young people will increasingly realize that competing to be #1 in the Great Conformity Competition is really dumb because it actually makes them less competitive where GPAs don't matter.

Imagine where you'd be if you were given the chance and encouragement to really focus on the things you loved while growing up. Young people should not be led to believe that there is one correct path for everyone.

Isn't this obvious to anyone who takes a little time to think about evolution and biodiversity? Yes, little changes caused by chance persist if they don't hinder the creature's ability to survive & reproduce. And these relatively benign mutations can accumulate until one family is very different from one that was once more obviously related. I don't see how this "surprising" and "provocative" proposal that chance plays a role in biodiversity is at all "controversial" or even new. What's more, the journalist seems to think that this "finding" means she can downplay natural selection, when in fact this article should really be nothing more than an emphasis of the role of chance in speciation since natural selection is basically predicated on the biodiversity caused by chance mutations. This really seems like publishing something 100 years after the first airplane was built to say: "Hear ye! Amazing new finding: In the absence of wings or power, an airplane simply falls due to gravity!" Maybe the actual research/paper is of more merit than the article suggests?

Kinda lame and not in line with what made PageRank so successful. Google should "not be evil" and have the decency to be as neutral as possible, allowing legitimate clicks and backlinks to judge the relevance of a website. If people can't stand websites that aren't tailored to mobile devices, they will simply leave and find another. I personally don't mind viewing a 20-year-old website through a little mobile browser if the content is satisfactory.

If they are to change anything in this area, they should simply put a little distinguishing checkmark by a mobile-friendly search result, but leave the rankings unchanged. And this should obviously be the case only when a user is on a mobile device.

I would occasionally copy my college papers into a text file and use my Mac's say command

  say -f paper.txt