montyf

Exactly what I was thinking. It may be a bug, but the AI treats it as another legitimate game rule. I wonder if there are any techniques for it to be able to tell the difference... for example, if it can quantitatively demonstrate that the conditions for a rule are very rare/unlikely.

The presidential election showed conclusively who the real propagandists in America are, and it’s not Russia. I’ll admit that I didn’t read the article, and this comment may not even be relevant, but I can’t take the Russian propaganda meme at all seriously, either in this lifetime or the next or the one after that. This meme is just more deflection and misdirection by the American media.

Feel free to downvote/remove this comment.

I read "Left in the Dark" and second the recommendation. It's quite an elegant hypothesis even if it doesn't seem to cover all of its bases, but it's a good jumping-off point for those interested in rationalizing phenomena related to consciousness.

For example, the book's theory that the dormant (but incredibly powerful) right brain (or subconscious or what have you) is responsible for our immune systems neatly explains things like the placebo effect, faith healing, miraculous lucid dream healing, etc.

If we assume that the Buddha's enlightenment was a total coming together of his mind, then all the seemingly supernatural abilities attributed to him, such as immunity to disease, start to make sense.

If you're in the US or Europe, you don't have access to fresh coconuts. The oil you buy comes from far away (do you even know from where?), was processed under God knows what conditions, likely melted and resolidified several times as it changed hands in transit, only to sit in a store for who knows how long and what corners they cut. And this is healthier than eating locally-produced oils that your body is more genetically disposed to eating -- how exactly?

Edit: don't want to rag on you too much, but modern healthy eating trends are saturated with all kinds of insanity.

The statements "sugar is bad", "fat is bad", "fat is good" are all equally simplistic and misleading. Fruits are high in naturally-occurring sugars and they are among the healthiest things you can eat.

Turns out that nutrition is a pretty complicated science, and there existing various political and special interests influencing the science doesn't help. It's 2018 and I don't think there's even remotely a scientific consensus on what food is healthy or not, but classic common sense and listening to your body's reactions to food can go pretty far for an individual.

Nutrition is something we need to figure out as public health is declining, and I'm saddened to say the problem goes beyond the US based on what I've seen traveling. Psychology needs to get involved as well. Why do people make such bad eating decisions? I'm in Thailand and I see tons of tourists eating hamburgers instead of the tastier and healthier traditional cuisine... sigh.

I was thinking about this today as I went through my browsing history from half a year ago. I'm not too worried. If anyone had access to that data they still wouldn't know what I was up to, what adventures I had, or even anything significant about me as a person. Cross-referencing to any posts I had made wouldn't help much, especially as I'm a big troll and write whatever nonsense I want. Maybe they would know some of my preferences back then, but those have changed by now. I think the problem is a lot of people lead ritualized, static lives, carrying around the same identities and ego structures for years and years. Such people are easily predictable, and controllable.

Agreed. While we still legally have freedom of speech, the real-life ramifications for speaking your mind can be enormous these days. Try being an outspoken Trump supporter in the tech bubble and see what happens. That's why I exclusively engage in internet discourse using pseudonyms like this one. When I was growing up, it was common sense that you don't use your real name on the internet. Now people have surrendered common sense to the social media companies and happily (and ignorantly) identify themselves in their posts, comments, tweets, blogs, etc. Many of them have suffered drastic consequences for doing so.

Tactful people are boring. :)

I was always under the impression that SAT scores correlate strongly with IQ, not with practice. I had almost a perfect score[0] on my SATs, and I only used about half the time available, and I did zero with a capital Z practice problems beforehand -- many other kids took practice tests every weekend and still performed abominably.

[0]: I only got two questions wrong on the entire test, both math problems. Since I was practically unstoppable at math back then, I always suspected that there were errors in grading.

That gives me an idea for a personal experiment. Have a session or two where your default attitude to every card is "this is really easy" and try not to think of any card as difficult in any way. Compare your recall percentage for the session compared to previous ones (Anki's statistics are great for this). I'll try this experiment myself.

People say and write all kinds of things. Just because this Dennet guy is known in whatever field he's in (I don't follow Western philosophy at all, it's still playing catch-up to Eastern thought from two millennia ago) doesn't mean his opinions should be taken seriously. I don't think he's a "philosophical zombie" or any other such inane term -- but people throughout the ages have believed all sorts of strange things even though the truth is sitting under our noses the whole time.

Right, you've described our “intuitive” view — I put that in quotes because it’s more likely that the nature of our society and its emphasis on “progress” has made us think that the future is a real thing. Actually, the present moment is the only real thing, and the future is just a mental projection made in the present moment. Perhaps surprisingly, so is the past — the past is an abstraction, a projection by our minds that doesn’t really exist. This isn’t just philosophy or speculation but a fact evident to any conscious being that doesn't try to rationalize abstractions into existence, as we Westerns often do.

Some would argue that the entire universe, past present and future, exists simultaneously for an outside observer — I believe there have been some results in quantum physics even suggesting this. This might apply to the physical world, but obviously not to consciousness.

One more thing: realizing this truth is actually very freeing, and has made me more adept at conducting life strategically in this world, not less.

You're telling me to consider the evidence? That's funny. Let's just ignore how the US government has been fudging studies for decades to support whatever agendas suited them, whether it be pro-wheat industry, pro-sugar industry, pro-pharmaceutical industry, the list goes on and on. I could spend a day sitting here listing examples of great Uncle Sam and their "studies" and "research". Seriously, I thought people on HN were just a little bit smarter than this.

> Zen and Buddhism in general is full of people like Alan Watts and Trungpa. Both were highly intelligent, inspiring writers, and alcoholics who presented themselves as masters.

Pretty sure you're wrong about Watts as I vividly remember reading in his book that he did not consider himself a guru. He also said something along the lines of there exists only one guru for you and that's you. Here's the first quote I could find, in its entirety:

> This is what gurus have used to trick you into seeing. All these trials they put you through are simply to convince you that you can’t do anything about it, but not “convince you” in a theoretical way. I’m not a guru—I don’t give individual spiritual direction to people—so maybe it’s not the best thing that I’m giving away the guru’s tricks, but I might as well. You can struggle and struggle and struggle, and you will do so for as long as you have the feeling inside you that you’re missing something. And everyone will encourage you to think this way, because they also feel they’re missing something, and they think they can get it by such and such a method, so they’re going to try to convince you that their method is the thing to do. - Out of Your Mind

Phew, that was a royal pain and a half to copy/paste from kindle cloud reader. Anyway, everyone knows about Watts's personal history by now, but no one could ever explain how it changed anything he wrote. He certainly didn't take himself very seriously at all, which is in line with his philosophy.

How isn't it?

Anyway, I agree with his comment but for a different reason: government "research" isn't historically trustworthy. Any psychedelics research sponsored by the government, directly or indirectly, is going to end up like marijuana research[0] and like research into alternative therapies[1]. Of course, they will continue coming up with opposite findings for drugs that lobbyists can profit from, like SSRI's. The FDA is able to literally pick and choose studies that work for them[2].

[0]: http://www.dispatch.com/news/20170319/governments-marijuana-...

[1]: http://www.nbcnews.com/id/31190909/ns/health-alternative_med... (It took 2.5 billion dollars to find out that yoga and meditation "may" help with anxiety etc.)

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Selective_serotonin_reuptake_i...

I think the vast majority of what we perceive as limits aren't real limits at all. Maybe that's a controversial statement, but there's little in the way of me doing most of I want to do except various fears and (largely) illusory limitations, conscious or not. I think this can apply to the HN crowd pretty easily -- for example, guys who don't apply to Google or who freeze up during the interview and don't know why.

Edit: I realize this sounds like a passage from a self-help book or motivational speech, but really, I've come to accept this as truth as I've gotten older, and I have many regrets over things I didn't do. I've also become skeptical over any kind of consensus regarding what is possible.

Thanks, that's really interesting, including the Criticisms section. I think that there must be a mix of psychological and physiological factors at play.

Not sure how directly relevant this is but I used to get dead-tired if I had any less than eight hours of sleep. I had spent most of my life hearing about how I "needed" at least eight hours. Then I had a period of insomnia where I would regularly get three hours a night which challenged this deeply-held belief. My functioning was impaired, of course, but it was comparable to how I functioned on 7 hours of sleep prior. Now I can sleep six hours a night without problems, having broken through some psychological barrier.

It being a biological limit is certainly possible; your post is interesting and I don't want to discount it. But I really do think psychology plays a huge role in these stories. From my personal experience running track and field this phenomenon occurs rather frequently. All it takes is one person achieving a long-standing milestone for the rest of the team to quickly follow suit. I've seen similar things happen in non-physical competitive games, like chess and dota 2, at the highest level.

Maybe there is some kind of safety mechanism built into our brains preventing us from doing things that we've never observed or heard of being done. Brain: "No one's ever run sub-4 minutes, so I don't know for sure whether doing so would kill me or not. Better not try."

Of course it exists, I am conscious right now and I presume you are, too. But where are our experiences located? Clearly nowhere in the physical universe. It's a really simple thing to grasp if you're not a dogmatic Materialist.

I always liked the story about the breaking of the 4 minute mile. It shows how easily our brains can box us in to particular views of reality, and how they act to further perpetuate this "reality". I bet that if a minute was, say, 65 seconds instead of 60, we still would have hit a "wall" trying to break the 4 minute mile.

> Everything else does and we've never found evidence of a single thing that doesn't.

Right, consciousness seems to be in its own, unique realm in some way.

> That I experience a feeling of existing in no way at all implies it's not based in physics.

That must be some trippy physics. It's probably safest to be agnostic about it, but it just seems absurd to me to imply that a mathematical formula can produce feeling or experience. How can you describe the experience of qualia mathematically? I think this is the Materialist view gone a step too far. Still, can't rule out any possibility if we're searching for the truth.

Probably no real impact. I'm not an expert and my knowledge on this comes entirely from a free guided tour of Lisbon I went on today, but the democracy was already a complete disaster. The second paragraph on this wikipedia article[0] says it all:

> The sixteen years of the First Republic saw nine presidents and 44 ministries, and have been described as consisting of "continual anarchy, government corruption, rioting and pillage, assassinations, arbitrary imprisonment and religious persecution".

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Portuguese_Republic

I used to worry about this a lot, especially in the context of anesthesia and whether I was conscious during my surgery and just blocking all memory of it. Does it even matter if we don't remember it? It's an interesting question. Can we form lasting traumas and phobias without any memory, conscious or unconscious, of the event? Who knows. The brain is incredibly complicated and, to my knowledge at least, we still don't even know how anesthesia works.

Consciousness is supernatural and metaphysical by virtue of it existing outside the natural and physical world. This is true even if we could prove that some formations of matter correlated or even had a one-to-one relationship to consciousness. It's easy to see that the experience of, say, reading this post exists nowhere in this physical universe. In fact, consciousness is the only supernatural phenomenon that we know of, and we even have first-hand, moment-to-moment proof of it.

That reminds me of this thread where user chinacat describes taking a thumbprint. He calls it a "beyond death experience". Very interesting stuff and I recommend reading his posts.

https://www.shroomery.org/forums/showflat.php/Cat/0/Number/1...

Also, reading about a few NDEs, they sound quite similar to a DMT trip, and they seem to have similar effects in terms of how a person completely changes afterwards. The range of possible conscious experiences is really something extraordinary and most humans only ever experience a miniscule fraction of it.

I got into Dota 2 after League -- now THAT is a great game to watch. I played for a while before quitting that, too; as you say, it sucks up a lot of time, and there was no surrender option. Going to the International must be a great experience, though.

Thanks, it's interesting to see articles like this every now and then as someone who briefly followed pro League back in the day. I guess it was Season 1 as I remember Doublelift being a lowly Blitz main before he switched to his current role. It was a lot of fun because there wasn't an officially sanctioned metagame -- not the case anymore. The game has been dull to watch for many years now.

Video games don't interest me these days, but the spirit of competition is one thing I miss about them. I always wonder what it's like to face the kind of pressure that top performers do.

That's a very open-ended question and not specific at all. Expecting a specific answer to that is just going to lead to disappointment for you and waste the time of your candidates.

If you tunnel-vision on expecting a specific answer when asking a vague, mostly irrelevant question, why would I want to work with you?

Frankly, I find your strategy for making new hires to be absolutely absurd.

I'm on a new computer and Slack takes at least a second to react to mouseclicks. It's completely ridiculous since, let's be honest here, Slack is a pretty basic chat app.