Messages

Preferably something I actually have a fair chance of explaining to them. Because I don't want my kids to come to think of me as a mean old fuck.

The problem with that sort of thing is that there may be a perfectly good justificat¡on for not giving them what they want, but the reason may not be pleasant to explain, or have it explained to you.

For example, a real reason not to give them smartphones is that they are too much fun. That will move their inner hedonic threshold to a point where they find the usual bullshit kids have to do (endless arithmetic problems, boring reading of terrible books) are now intolerable.

But you can't tell them that. We can't even tell ourselves that, sometimes, which is why this argument is often expressed in a more nuanced, positive-sounding way. For example, by romanticizing boredom.

An apprpiate quote by George Orwell, who complained that political speech was too patronizing (get it? because patrionizing comes from the latin pater, which means father, lol).

In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defence of the indefensible. Things like the continuance of British rule in India, the Russian purges and deportations, the dropping of the atom bombs on Japan, can indeed be defended, but only by arguments which are too brutal for most people to face, and which do not square with the professed aims of the political parties. Thus political language has to consist largely of euphemism, question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness.

I look at her behavior, and ask which is more probable. Later priors (in the Bayesian sense) include her giving a sly wink with the "I win" quote, and the struggle it took her to make the video, which increases the probability of "clever troll". Other priors, such as mocking Sinead's mental illness as a petty jab increase the probability of "entitled narcissist".

Just the way I think these days, I guess.

Those probabilities are not independent, though. There is such a thing as a narcissistic clever troll, or even an entitled narcissistic clever troll.

If you mean that the core "me" dying with the brain is untestable, I'd point to studies of people with severe brain trauma.  They become completely different people, often disgusted by who they were before.  That seems reasonably to indicate that who we are is largely based on our genetics and the chemicals flowing through our brain, doesn't it?  Or am I misreading your point?

as long as we're out here in bat country, let me play devil's advocate for a sec



maybe consciousness isn't a product of the brain, but is facilitated by it

like maybe consciousness is like a television signal being broadcast from somewhere - our particular neural hardware is the receiver, like a television antennae

then brain damage is just a bent antennae, the signal is fine, but it's being interpreted as static and noise

But what about feedback? You need a transmitter in your brain too, not just a receiving antenna, so your sensory input can reach your "soul".

That means when you die, the brain's transmitter is broken, and your soul is stuck in limbo with no means to perceive anything or communicate with the outside world 

[PROFESSIONAL OPINION HAT:]

PROFESSIONAL OPINION HAT: SEO is a thing that I help do. It's both the best and the worst thing about search engines, because on the one hand it helps small businesses compete with national companies, but on the other hand it's used to get junk sites high in the rankings for ad revenue. On the one hand, this seems like it would be really easy to game: just visit your website a bunch of times and stay there forever. That works in the early phases, but once you get a lot of people using it your attempts to game will get lost in the noise. Hiring other people to sit on your site for a while is a viable tactic... kinda. The reason you can outsource captchas and terrible writing is because those things don't take up a lot of time, so somebody sitting in a room in Malaysia or wherever can do a ton of them during the day. To pull off a successful game on blippex, you'd be paying per visitor, and they'd be staying on your site for several minutes at a time at minimum, and then they'd need to visit other websites to make the data less obviously faked. It would get expensive, fast. Even if you're just paying one person to manage a lot of computers*, that hardware doesn't buy itself.

Additionally, you won't see ANYONE on a professional level attempting to game blippex until it gains a lot more market share. Just like no one wrote any viruses for Macs in the 90s, no one is going to waste time building out a large scale campaign to skew search results on an engine that a tiny fraction of users have ever heard of. Hell, the only reason anybody does SEO for Bing is because the same tricks work as with Google, and in fact they're a little more effective on Bing.

So, this is really interesting and totally worth watching and contributing to. The results are likely going to be legitimate for at least a year or two, and that's like forever in internet years.


* or tablets, or smartphones...

Maybe you could convince legitimate users to stay longer on your website somehow.
So instead of "like this silly thing on Facebook for a chance to win a prize", you could say "play this stupid game that takes five minutes to beat and you might get a prize".

Speaking of narcissism and Stockholm Syndrome, I found Alone's Abusive Boyfriend metaphor to be very insightful.

Given the context of this thread, I probably spoiled the ending, but it's a very good read anyway.

Yes, everything can be boiled down to "that's cool" or "that sucks" but... the difference resides in the criterions one utilizes to define each of them - it can involve things like critical thinking, examining an idea against what reality shows and experimentation - or it can be something so basic as instincts and what is convenient in a short-sighted manner.

Yes, I was going to say that the reaction may boil down to "that's cool" or "that sucks", but the processes we use to arrive at that conclusion come in varied levels of complexity, and additional complexity is piled on when/if we re-evaluate our original conclusion from time to time. In addition, there is a vast shaded middle area, that of "that might suck/be cool but I'm not really sure".

Most of the time I feel like I do a snap judgement like "that sucks" and only afterwards think "why do I believe it sucks? there must be a reason..."

When that happens, no matter what the complexity of the process I use to "arrive" at that conclussion, it's already too late, too easy to rationalize.

From the lesswrong sequences:

I realized that once I could guess what my answer would be—once I could assign a higher probability to deciding one way than other—then I had, in all probability, already decided.  We change our minds less often than we think.  And most of the time we become able to guess what our answer will be within half a second of hearing the question.

How swiftly that unnoticed moment passes, when we can't yet guess what our answer will be; the tiny window of opportunity for intelligence to act.  In questions of choice, as in questions of fact.

After the revelations that the NSA has been spying on Brazil's government (particularly on president Dilma Rousseff and the state-owned oil company Petrobras), their government is trying to force some web companies to keep their data about brazilian citizens in brazilians datacenters. That way, they would have to comply with brazilian privacy laws.

There are also plans to connect Brazil with the rest of South America and with Europe directly with fiber, so their communications won't go through American servers and they won't be spied on. This won't work (the NSA has been tapping undersea cables for some time) but is still a good idea for other reasons (more availability, less latency).

The reaction from the American press has been hilarious:

Internet security and policy experts say the Brazilian government's reaction to information leaked by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden is understandable, but warn it could set the Internet on a course of Balkanization.

Matthew Green, a Johns Hopkins computer security expert, said Brazil won't protect itself from intrusion by isolating itself digitally. It will also be discouraging technological innovation, he said, by encouraging the entire nation to use a state-sponsored encrypted email service.

"It's sort of like a Soviet socialism of computing," he said, adding that the U.S. "free-for-all model works better."

Taking advantage of the apparent agreement on this chart, can i just point out that Cannabis is kind of in the middle, with its Dependency rating being on par with Amphetamine amd higher than other illicit drugs.

And lower than some licit ones.
A few pages from now, you are going to remind us that cannabis should be evaluated on its own merits, so it's a moot point anyway.

MAKING porn as a hobby, on the other hand...

And then we can staple, "HI!  I'M A COMMODITY!" to our faces, and go running off into the future!

You can REMIX porn made by others, if making it yourself makes you uncomfortable.
Don't distribute the results, though. That would be against intellectual property laws, not to mention the laws of decency.

I particularly liked McGrupp's emphasis on the cost of drug use being fundamentally an oportunity cost. That is, drugs themselves aren't bad, but there are so many better things you could be doing with your time.

You could say that same thing about many hobbies, though, unless your hobby is fighting crime or something.

I disagree almost completely with your last sentence. Unless your hobby is laying around watching porn and masturbating, most likely it involves either a social or a creative element, possibly both, which stimulate intelligence and forge connections with other people, both of which are constructive uses of time. Some hobbies also result in a salable product or a useful/marketable skill. Hobbies are rarely useless or detrimental, whereas doing drugs is typically pretty useless at best.

I hadn't considered the benefits of creativity and stimulating inteligence and socialization for their own sake. A strange mistake to make, certainly. Thanks for bringing it up.

I particularly liked McGrupp's emphasis on the cost of drug use being fundamentally an oportunity cost. That is, drugs themselves aren't bad, but there are so many better things you could be doing with your time.

You could say that same thing about many hobbies, though, unless your hobby is fighting crime or something.

That's the old existential conundrum, isn't it?
How to live your life when no one tells you what to do and everything seems too complicated.

Life in the past was very difficult but, in retrospect, very simple. Life now is a lot easier, but more complex.
I can deal with complexity, so obviously I prefer my modern, easy, complex life. So do most of you.
I can see why some people might feel differently, though.

In moderation and not every day drugs can be pretty fun (not magikal, though)

The big negative for me with drugs and the one that doesn't seem to get talked about that much is that it's easy to rely on them when you're bored or upset or just to deal with what you're doing at the time. But here's the thing, do that long enough and all the time you would have spent, painting, writing, going outside, creating, thinking, and making new friends was spent on drugs.

Sure it was all a good time but then you wake up and realize that years have passed. You didn't do the things you were really interested in. You're an artist that never made art. You're a writer that never wrote. You go to a party and realize you have nothing to talk about because all you've done is drugs for weeks. And the older you get the more pronounced this gap with the rest of the world becomes.

Alternate states of consciousness can be a lot of fun but if you're fucked up all the time it's not really an altered state, it's just a state.

Also known as dependency.

This is a very interesting take on dependency. Dependency not as "I have to take drugs because if I don't I feel sick/tired/depressed/whatever", but dependency as in "I'm bored, and I could work on one of those things I always wanted to do but didn't becuase I had no time... but drugs are easier"

It's like that experiment Bruce Alexander did with some rats. He gave heroin to some lab rats and they were completely dependent. But then he moved the rats to a much bigger cage, where they could socialize with other rats, play in the running wheels and whatnot. Suddenly, the rats were not dependent on heroin anymore.
( I read about that experiment here: http://boingboing.net/2013/09/16/bruce-alexanders-rat-park-a.html )

An analogy could be made with masturbation. It's usually more about relieving boredom than relieving horniness.

Well, I don't agree with the idea that it no longer makes sense for marijuana to be illegal.


That aside, it still does not add up, this idea that not removing a law adds laws.  That is fuzzy math.

Laws are added all the time, no matter what we do. What regret said was that if we don't remove some laws at least as fast as new laws are being added, then naturally the number of laws will increase. Fairly simple math.

We don't agree on which laws should be added or substracted, but that there are more and more laws is not controversial.

That makes no sense whatsoever.

As an analogy, think of Bruce Schneier's critique against No Fly Lists:

The TSA has every incentive to put suspicious people in that list, because the cost of putting someone in that list who shouldn't be there is low (For them. The people in the list disagree). And the incentive to remove inocent people from that list is... nothing. Less than nothing, because the cost of making a mistake in that case is huge. Because of that, the list is always growing.

It's the same with regulation: The government regulates a product or a behavior because it makes sense, but when it stops making sense, suddenly the burden of proof shifted and it's impossible to deregulate anything that was once regulated.

Thinking about it, I realize that this analogy may be even more complicated than the "simple" case of drug legalization (apologies if that's the case), but since it doesn't go against your biases, who knows, maybe you can see my point.