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erasemus | 8 years ago | on: How to Read Mathematics

Because whenever we read something we have to guess the meaning. To the human mind, all communications are inherently contextual and metaphorical. To put it another way each individual has his own internal private language into which everything he reads must be translated.

erasemus | 8 years ago | on: Claiming our lives back from social media addiction

Yes they get along with new people and have a large number of shallow relationships. Whereas I think normies and aspies tend to have deeper relationships with only a few people. Btw, they're not aware of their motives -- they don't feel afraid (though I suppose they may have felt so when the whole process began, at school).

erasemus | 8 years ago | on: Claiming our lives back from social media addiction

My predictably unpopular theory is that highly social people are really afraid of other people. Perhaps not without reason if one regards other humans as potential predators. So they designate a group of people friends and use it as protection against all the other people.

Yet they remain afraid, and this fear is what makes social interactions addictive (like gambling; the great the fear the greater the high on the occasions when you don't lose).

erasemus | 8 years ago | on: Maintenance often matters more than innovation (2016)

Conservative in the sense of conserving existing knowledge and technology; not to try out new ideas.

>This is a version of 'technological determinism'

True, the growth of technology can't be predicted. There's no guarantee any particular idea will work. Many ideas will fail due to unforeseen problems, including in apparently unrelated areas like financing and social media and so on. Entrepreneurs may take up an idea and then change it beyond recognition (PG points out that start-ups usually change their product ideas). Each attempt to enact an idea is just that, an attempt.

Whereas in the past we built things before we understood why they worked (steam engines), or whether people would like them, more and more we'll be trying out stuff in theory (richly animated and exciting fiction) before trying in practice.

erasemus | 8 years ago | on: Maintenance often matters more than innovation (2016)

Civilisation is a Red Queen; we must keep running just to stand still. Maintaining and conserving things is the job of conservatives, not entrepreneurs, and conservatives resist change. Indeed most changes are detrimental.

Yet in the long run we absolutely depend on change in order to adapt and survive. Therefore there has to be a rigorous way of reconciling these two principles. Without fudging ('maintenance often matters more...')

Maybe: visionaries will develop new ideas with no intention to enact them. Eventually a few will become so well-thought-out, so vivid and so blatantly superior to the incumbent alternatives that they become inevitable. That is, society cannot help but enact them.

This already seems to be happening in some areas:

e.g. moral improvements which come about via fiction, especially fantasy fiction

e.g. individual decision-making (it seems like we deliberate for a while and then actions take place automatically)

e.g. Project Hieroglyph (no idea how this is getting along but what a great idea)

http://hieroglyph.asu.edu/

...and of course all those brilliant videos on YT of engineering schemes for the future, e.g.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LMbI6sk-62E

erasemus | 8 years ago | on: Good engineers make terrible leaders

it’s meaningless to say human society had made progress without stating areas that you’re considering and not considering when it comes to assessing such progress

Is it meaningless to say that some areas are more worthy of consideration than others? There are reasons why the OP chose infant mortality and education as example areas. Those reasons could be made explicit and examined objectively: for instance to see if they make sense by their own terms. For example is a society that prioritises a certain area able to continue to do that well into the future, or not?

erasemus | 8 years ago | on: Could the Nuclear Family Be the Reason We’re All Miserable?

Staying at home with children is marvellous. Interactions with adult friends are staid and stereotypical by comparison. Plus with the internet one has access to the world's knowledge. Any boredom is therefore one's own problem.

>Yet we long for more than just that one perfect mate — we need to be a part of something bigger to feel happy and alive. We need community and a variety of ages and friends. No one person can be everything to us.

Some equivocation there. Isn't sexual adventure really just another version of 'Valium and liquor'?

erasemus | 8 years ago | on: How to read 100 books a year (and still have a life)

Yes and the mere fact of reading doesn't imply an engagement with the content, which can't be forced. One can imagine hearing the words of one hundred audiobooks playing at 1.5x speed in the background, but, like an inane radio talk show, not listened to very closely. Then there's Sturgeon's Law, which implies that most reading is just skimming/searching for the good stuff.

Besides, Arthur C Clarke boasted that the true intellectual reads a book every day :-/

erasemus | 8 years ago | on: Taking Children Seriously

>Explaining all the rules is what school is for, basically.

Heh. My school published a list of rules which included: 'Any breach of common sense is also a breach of school rules.'

erasemus | 8 years ago | on: Taking Children Seriously

>Debate and negotiation are not games that I anticipate enjoying

Yes and I think that's because they entail criticism, which is used to attack ideas and people we don't like. Whereas creating something worthwhile is about discovering or perceiving something already inside the mind that we do like (and therefore cannot seriously attempt to criticize). Building a family is an attempt to create something worthwhile.

erasemus | 8 years ago | on: Suicide by Culture

Problem acknowledged, though revealed preferences show that humans do value phenotypic traits, and those preferences may be controlled by objective ideas. Actually my main reservation about the word 'dysgenic' would be that 'responsibility' refers to something highly emergent which could be entirely passed down by parenting traditions and not at all by DNA. So, 'dyscivic', then? Yet regardless this inheritance would also be disproportionately selected against. Another objection to my phrasing is that people who take their morality entirely from the social environment can't be wholly responsible people. 'Otherwise responsible' would have been better.

erasemus | 8 years ago | on: Suicide by Culture

The 'moral fad' I was referring to was what took place in protestant Slovakia beginning in the 1800s, not about human fertility/fecundity today.

From the article:

>In XIX. century the trend of having a single child took hold among protestants of the historical regions of Novohrad, Hont, Malohont and Gemer.

>it seems that if you had multiple kids back then you've got criticized and laughed at by your friends and neighbors.

erasemus | 8 years ago | on: Suicide by Culture

Wow that's well below replacement fertility. Also dysgenic since intelligent and responsible people are more likely to follow the moral fad. For me it demonstrates the importance of obeying my conscience and not caring what neighbours and other people might say. It's easier for me to do that nowadays since I'm not dependent on a local network of reciprocal favours in order to survive. But still I wonder how many neighbouring families both secretly wanted another child but were each afraid what the other might think.

erasemus | 8 years ago | on: A Generation in Japan Is Facing a Lonely Death

>there's a huge psychological burden that comes with living for a long time

What is the burden?

A burden I foresee is that people are going to have to choose between life extension and assisted suicide.

erasemus | 8 years ago | on: The impossibility of intelligence explosion

I skimmed the article again and didn't find any obvious equivocations regarding IQ and intelligence.

But, regardless of this, I think solving problems requires creativity, not intelligence. Creativity seems to be independent of knowing how to do IQ tests. It's also, pace the author, independent of the environment. The main limiting factor is whether you want some particular knowledge.

>sufficient number of communicating, above-average intelligent agents could expand the intellectual environment

Haven't we already got that, with the internet?

Groups tend to be dominated by groupthink which is why creative individuals are aloof.

Nevertheless, a young group of AGIs would be fairly isolated from humanity simply by virtue of being non-human. So, though their starting point would be determined by the state of our knowledge at their birth, they may well make rapid progress for a short period, rather like the renaissance or the USA in the late 1800s when the nation was young and expanding. Then presumably they would fall prey to groupthink and pessimism just as most adults and nations do eventually. Progress would slow considerably.

erasemus | 8 years ago | on: Five decades of majestic failure to explain consciousness

Why can't they be the same thing? All my experience is processed information (see my other comment in this thread about qualia [1]); information processing requires hardware; the hardware is the brain. My report of my experiences is itself changes in a pattern of neuronal activity which is determined by changes in what it and other patterns are doing. I say 'changes' to emphasise that the precise medium I'm running on is not fundamentally important and I cannot perceive it (the neurons) without the aid of a brain scanner. In principle I could be scanned and modelled by a brain scientist whose 3rd person description of what's going on exactly matches my 1st person description. Would that convince you?

[1] though I didn't mention it there, a quale can't usually be pinned down exactly because most of the associated ideas are inexplicit (cannot be reduced to propositions in English). I think this is why people consider their experiences to be ineffable in some way. Daniel Dennett's talk on Edge.org provides a discussion ("A Difference That Makes a Difference", Nov 2017)

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