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Hypocrisy
Hypocrisy confuses me. How can someone someone be angry to be called a “TERF” (Trans Exclusionary Radical Feminist), how can they denounce it an anti-feminist insult, when in the next breath deny the existence of Trans-* people? That’s what the acronym means. How can someone claim that it’s justified for a police officer to shoot…
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Mistakes
It is important to keep track of one’s mistakes — you can’t learn to be better if you don’t. Here is one of mine from 2016: “Trump and Clinton are both equally awful”. Ye gods, how I wish that was so. I saw each as just two more in the same mould as all other…
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To believe falsely
“If there were a verb meaning ‘to believe falsely’, it would not have any significant first person, present indicative.” —Ludwig Wittgenstein Would “confusion” not be such a first person, present indicative? Or am I confused about the meaning of the Wittgenstein quote? (Update a few days later: Turns out I forgot the phrase “cognitive dissonance”,…
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Ohne Kaffee
As anyone who has spent any significant time with me will know, I have a genuinely problematic relationship with coffee. If I don’t watch myself I can drink nothing but coffee all day, sometimes even double strength — 4 cups is one thing, 2 litres of double strength is too much. Because of this, every…
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Sufficient technology
Let’s hypothesise sufficient brain scans. As far as I know, we don’t have better than either very low resolution full-brain imaging (millions of synapses per voxel), or very limited high resolution imaging (thousands of synapses total), at least not for living brains. Let’s just pretend for the sake of argument that we have synapse-resolution full-brain…
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Hypothesise first, test later
Brought to you by me noticing that when I watch Kristen Bell playing an awful person in The Good Place, I feel as stressed as when I have to consciously translate to or from German in real-life situations and not just language apps. Idea: System 2 thinking (effortful) is stressful to the mind in the…
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The worst form of government except for all the others
(Does this sound fair? I’m not formally qualified in politics). Democracy The only way to get a government which wants to do the sort of things the public are OK with. Technocracy The only way to get a government of people who know what they’re talking about. Industrialism The only way to provide a government…
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Morality, thy discount is hyperbolic
One well known failure mode of Utilitarian ethics is a thing called a “utility monster” — for any value of “benefit” and “suffering”, it’s possible to postulate an entity (Bob) and a course of action (The Plan) where Bob receives so much benefit that everyone else can suffer arbitrarily great pain and yet you “should”…
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Memetic monocultures
Brief kernel of an idea: Societies deem certain ideas “dangerous”. If it possible to technologically eliminate perceived dangers, we can be tempted to do so, even when we perceived wrongly. Group-think has lead to catastrophic misjudgments. This represents a potential future “great filter” for the Fermi paradox. It does not apply to previous attempts at…
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Newcomb’s Assured Destruction
This evening I noticed a similarity between Newcomb’s Paradox and MAD. It feels like the same problem, just with a sign change. Newcomb’s Paradox The player has two boxes, A and B. The player can either take only box B, or take both A and B. Box A is clear, and always contains a visible…
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