Helianthus16

Ignoring collectivist thinking is a fault when people do in fact act in groups. It is even more so a fault when referring to the violation of rights, when rights only exist as a collectivist decision.

If you were about to meet this tribe, there is nothing you can do about the fact that you are a member of a Western culture meeting a member of a tribal culture, and your different groups--national, cultural, philosophical (in the sense of your strict individualism)--are interacting in important ways. Denying the problem by pretending there are no groups does not make it go away.

It's been running for two years on some unnamed factory before they invited 50 people over to see it, and they still don't have even an arxiv paper?

science isn't done in backrooms.

color me skeptic. as soon as crayola comes out with that crayon.

Prolly too late for you to see this, but that "[working] with not being absolutely certain" is precisely faith in its truest, most broad form. God in this faith is not the sky wizard of atheistic clap-trap, but a question: if some entity is responsible for all of this bullshit existence, is that person on our side? Faith is the answer 'yes.' Atheism doesn't have an answer via attacking the question, which is fine until we are forced to face it.

which will happen.

you're making the definition of calculated risk much more technical than it needs to be.

I ain't saying they did a formal cost-benefit analysis of the whole thing.

You seem to think that people can or ought to have an answer for every situation, should be prepared for every contingency; that there is a perfect understanding that one can just _follow_ and have everything turn out alright. That's great if it's how you can live your life, but 1) one day I bet you'll find that your preparation and contingencies were just an illusion, that luck has had its way with you--I mean, haven't you ever wondered what would have happened to you if your dad just died when you were 12? _That happens to people who were just like you_; and 2) most people don't have that and have to make choices without knowing what's behind the next door.

It's a YC startup because even if a person was willing to accept the cost of the contingency labeled "risk that didn't work out," there's still a valuable service in saying, surprise!, you will pay less for taking that risk by using our shiny software!

It is about both. Debt means plunging closer towards poverty. Escaping from poverty means being careful about debt.

The debate is actually about what informational tools people have available to them. This is demonstrated by your statement:

>It's not hard to stay out of debt - you simply have to heed the message that money is transmitting to you.

which is equivalently "It's not hard to stay out of debt if you're equipped with the attitudes that let you stay out of debt" which is tautological and therefore a non-statement. My point is that poverty _means_ being less likely to understand money.

My point is _not_ accurately summed up by "But one shouldn't have to forgo an education to avoid going into debt." I make no assertion about what a person _should_ do because that doesn't have anything to do with what they actually will do. I would prefer the phrasing "People _will_ choose a risk of debt in order to have their kids better educated" as that more accurately captures the situation. Not all of the people who put it all on the line to live in a better neighborhood ended up in debt. Some of them got lucky and did not have medical emergencies--for them, the risk paid off.

So your statement about whether or not schools are "overwhelmingly important" is true but irrelevant. Schools aren't overwhelmingly important, but they _are_ important. They improve the odds of success. Your personal success in a shit-hole school does not speak to the average of that school nor does it comment on whether or not it is sensible for a parent to risk additional debt for a better school.

I hope he was talking about something a little more subtle, like the fact that we have so many Hispanic people here without citizenship and have therefore created a sort of lower subservient class. But probably not, slavery's a bit too strong a term unless there's a somewhat-mitigating "wage" in front of it.

Ok.

India is now an "important" country. Burgeoning technologically and culturally, what it received from Britain was access to the intellectual firestorm of the Enlightenment. Hindu thinkers were involved in the formation of Universalism, the idea that all religions were different aspects of the same thing and could be united.

Of course, it cost them the pain of the Pakistan-India divide, the struggle of Gandhi, and a confusing cultural identity among a people that didn't necessarily have a singular cultural identity in the first place. But what price is too much?

South Africa paid the price, and is now among the most advanced of African nations.

Of course, most indigenous peoples just got royally fucked. Aboriginal Australians and the Maori. So I suppose your point in general holds.

I would assert that the problem is in the problem and not in Star Trek's analysis of the problem.

That is to say, the problem of interference and controlling choice is not an easy one. Star Trek portrays one viewpoint and its pitfalls. That's not muddying, that's _clarifying_ how muddy it already s.

yes, he did. it's a little absurd, but I believe his main point is still valid.

the inquisition &etc were as much about cultural conformity and control than about espousing a culture of violence. while ridiculous the question is not to compare ridiculousness levels but to compare the _reasons_ that people were doing the ridiculous things they did.

killing people for the express and explicit purpose of killing people is bad mojo.

You don't know how bad schools can be.

>Certainly in my childhood and young adult life there were a number of factors to my success or lack of it that had nothing to do with which school I attended.

But would those factors be the same at a different school? I'm going to commit a minor sin and say a statistic without a citation; the average ACT score among teachers in Chicago was 19 a few years back.

You say you went to a shit hole high school, in which case you really _should_ have a sense of perspective on the whole thing. If your school was a shitty as you say, you must have been near the very, very top of your class (not in class rank but in overall success). That's a huge distribution of people who are _not you_, who went on to more desperate lives.

yeah, what? that's a lot of assumptions. people don't live with assumptions, they live with the realities of having a kid or a spouse or a family or even a girl they just can't get over.

In that story, the "irresponsible" part is that they took a gamble in order for their kids to grow up in a better neighborhood, and lost.

Sounds like a somewhat calculated risk rather than irresonsibility to me.

also everything people have said about your position of privilege

except that loyalty to a quirkiness is seen as individualistic and therefore admirable.

not saying you're wrong--well, actually, i am saying you're wrong.

i'm not saying there aren't valid reasons to change his screen name now or previously. i'm saying there are also valid reasons to keep it.

and I still think it's funny.

dude, mistrust of others isn't about assuming everyone's out to get you, it's assuming that one person can ruin things for everyone, which is true.

The very existence of that "insult" amuses me. I miss the days when cooler than cool meant ice cold.

<meta>I posted this partially to experimentally examine the downvote clumping effect I've noticed on hn, where some reasonable responses to highly downvoted posts get downvoted by association.</meta>

I honestly did not understand if you were being sarcastic in your third paragraph.

I'm still not sure, but it seems you're peeved that Twitter hasn't been perfect and not impressed with Rainbird. (Right?)

This is a bit unfair I think? No one's really waiting for your advice on how to run your data center, whereas Twitter is dealing with the sort of volume that your data center probably couldn't begin to handle without finding some of the same solutions Twitter is now presenting.

Now we could possibly (depending on what you actually meant) get into a debate about Twitter's failures, but that's really not interesting, because your second paragraph is true: technological perfection is not enough by itself.

That doesn't mean Twitter doesn't have anything interesting to say about technological perfection.

But mostly I posted this in order to express the sheer confusion I felt reading your post. If you don't like Twitter, just say so.

>Faith is, fundamentally, the process of maintaining beliefs in the face of 1) absent evidence and 2) conflicting evidence.

This is the tired beaten horse of atheistic criticism, taking the general principle that one must make a leap out of indecision and doubt in order to achieve any sort of meaningful viewpoint and twisting it, torturing it into the statement "Faith is explicitly about not making sense."

Faith _is also_ the means by which we escape such boring philosophical questions as "Is the sun going to rise the next day?" or "How do you _know_???" Whether or not you believe that the word "faith" applies to your acceptance of the precepts of science ("I believe the world is consistent.") does not change the fact that the mechanism by which you escape a possibly infinite amount of doubt is by taking the leap outside of it. "Doubt does me nothing; faith gives me something to work with."

They're both important. I'm never sure I'll use a groupon when I buy it, but I can always be talked into buying a gadget if it's cheap or a shirt if it strikes my fancy.

It's wasting its buzz time, then. If (that is, When) this hubbub blows over and we think of Quora as "that thing that never caught on" it will already be too late to gain traction.

I think that I ended on that point because it's rather telling how we still manage to take upvotes and downvotes seriously, making us much more similar to reddit than we could ever be different.

"Industry" is the clear term here, I think, indicating precisely who and what is dying.

Will music suffer? Certainly not. Is there anyone who thinks we rely on the music industry for... well, music?

The only sense we rely on the music industry is in that we let it tell us what to like. And there are advantages to that (I do not mean to sound so tinfoil'd).

But I can go down to a blues bar and hear talented musicians that the music industry ignores.

When I hear the headline "Music Industry Braces for the Unthinkable," I think "Music Industry tries to come to grips with its coming demise."

This topic is hilarious for demonstrating the "we don't want to be reddit" background angst that permeates Hacker News. Allow me to make the following vaguely contradictory points in quick succession:

1) The sort of commentary that assumes other people have read the frontpage and felt similar things is actually the sign of a strong community. chirsaycock's post agreeing with OP is highly voted because a lot of people _did_ see today's posts and sigh a little on the inside.

2) This level of meta leads to people making stupid meta points. Someone actually said "This." on this site? bah!

3) "witty remarks considered harmful," a post that I personally find amusing, is in a state of "very downvoted." what absolutely delicious irony.

4) A significant presentation of negativity considering how many people apparently agree with the general point about the snowclone. We agree with you, lenary, we just don't agree about how we agree with you. "How dare you be right about us?"

5) Some actually funny meta-humor, but then you realize you've seen it before on reddit. I'm referring of course to the thread beginning "I have an opinion."

6) Will you upvote me or downvote me? Discuss.

I reject your case. Self-identification isn't even necessarily something that's public. It's as much a question of who you are to yourself.

Self-identification is a broad topic. Sports fans create opposition with other self-identified fans for the sheer hell of it. Crack addicts self-identify. Being married is a joint self-identification.

In any case, the redundancy is meant to force the argument to the other definition. My prime point is not that they think they're smart, it's that they're trying to sort people into valid/invalid thinking bins.

And as a side note, there's something very wrong with thinking that social signaling or labeling is a trap.

Your third paragraph is correct and I'm confused why you thought it was contrary to my point.

I'm not saying that no one has any trace of stupidity. I'm saying that the concept of stupidity-intelligence is not a binary, it is a gradient.

What I'm arguing is that the question reveals its flaws, and the flaws of the lesswrong community. A member who self-identifies as part of that community is either being redundant by saying something about themselves that applies to every human being, or they are being elitist by implying that they have (or seek, and therefore have) some special understanding of the universe.

This is illustrated because Kenneth is dividing the world into people who are right and wrong and wondering if being wrong can sometimes be right. It's nonsense, a question brought about by too much caring how right you can be.

That was intentional. As he could not or did not condense the points of the paper (partly because he didn't personally agree) I did not have anything to work with; as there wasn't a link to the article, I did not have anything to read; as my point was never about mathematical certainty the question of mathematical proofs being true is irrelevant.

As described in your quote, mathematical truth is not the same thing as whether any thought can be true.

Though while I'm here, I'd say that it's some weird ego-thing that humans think they've 'created' math while simultaneously thinking it's flimsy. Math is a property of the universe.

>I'll leave it without argument that "stupidity" should not in general be a desirable state.

I'm not saying we should question the concept of stupidity, I'm saying that self-identifying as a rationalist is like self-identifying as a human--that is to say, it's redundant. And if it isn't redundant, then it's elevating your personal rationality above others.

That was the point of my caveat, actually, the "whether they say so or not."

Nihilists still act as if things are true and kinda negate their own point. That guy who wrote a tome about meaninglessness and then offed himself at Harvard wrote a poem about meaning and finding it _through_ belief in meaninglessness.

That's a little besides the point, however, because I think it fundamental that it is only after experiencing meaninglessness that we are free to create meaning. How do you know what's really important to you? It's what you do after you don't think anything matters.

There are people who are _actually_ nihilists, who _actually_ cannot bind meaning functionally anymore. They are some subset of schizophrenics, I suspect.

If you really, fully believed that not meaning nor truth existed (which is a contradiction since the justification for the argument must use the concept of truth) you would be unable to function.

tl;dr the theory of meaninglessness is useful as an abstraction but it is not a practical reality.

>rather the realization that some are dumber and some are smarter.

What? You think that begins with _rationalism??_ The world is divided up into people who realize this and people who do not?--for that is what defining 'rationalist' in the context of people's self-identification attempts to do.

Your definition leads right back to mine. Everyone realizes it. Everyone!

Your definition does not contest my either-or equivalence, my assertion that "rationalist" either means "human being" or "someone whose identity involves caring about other people's dumbness."

Mostly it's just dressing up how people think with terminology. Virtue-ethicist = "believes in bad and good." Maximizing truth = "trying to be right."

Who is not a rationalist by your definition?

I think your language, even in the title, indicates the problem with the question, and why, while I appreciate the goals, purposes, and actions of the lesswrong crowd, I wouldn't consider... um, "joining up."

The whole premise, as I see it, of being a rationalist is that there are particular methods to working with truth, that there is an actual truth, and a solid, singular rationality. The problem is that there is no sense in, having begun using them, declaring that you are now in charge of the truth or really have any particular access at all.

Statistical analysis doesn't prove things correct. It allows us to prove things incorrect. The assertion that whatever is left is true, is correct, typifies rationality.

But here's the thing, here's why it's called lesswrong, why the idea is to increment in favor of the truth: everyone's actually pretty rational. Some people are more wrong than others, but given the assumptions they work with, they are making rational choices.

If you are declaring people irrational, the problem is with your definition of rationality, not with them. In finding out _why_ they are rational you will find out _why_ they think differently than you.

Take atheism vs. theism. The assumption of irrationality on either party shuts down debate and lets no information traverse between the viewpoints.

But if you realize that everyone's pretty much the same, the problem you raise just _goes away_. Everyone's at a different place on the axis of rationality, no one is stupid, and there are people who are more right than you so there's not much point being annoyed with those who are less right.

So calling one's self a rationalist, to me, is either equivalent to saying "I am a human being," because all humans are somewhat rational and believe in the assertion that true things can be known (whether they say so or not), or "Other people are dumber than me and that is a part of my identity."