If it's worth saying, but not worth its own post (even in Discussion), then it goes here.
I was chatting with Toby Ord recently about a series of events we think we've observed in ourselves:
- In analyzing a how the future might develop, we set aside some possible scenarios for various reasons: they're harder to analyze, or they're better outsourced to some domain expert at Cambridge, or whatever.
- Some time passes, and we forget why we set aside those scenarios.
- Implicitly, our brains start to think that we set aside those scenarios because they were low probability, which leads us to intuitively place too much probability mass on the scenarios we did choose to analyze.
I wish I had an intuitive name for this, which made analogy to some similar process, ala "evaporative cooling of group beliefs." But the best I've heard so far is the "pruning effect."
It may not be a special effect, anyway, but just a particular version of the effect whereby a scenario you spend a lot of time thinking about feels intuitively more probable than it should.
Virtue ethics versus consequentialism: The Neuroscientist Who Discovered He Was a Psychopath
Account by someone who's highly dependent on prescription hormones to function, some description of the difficulties of finding a doctor who was willing to adjust the hormones properly, a little about the emotional effects of the hormones, and a plea to make hormones reliably available. It sounds like they're almost as hard to get reliably as pain meds.
Moldbug weighs in on the Techcrunch thing, with words on LW:
Alexander is a disciple of the equally humorless "rationalist" movement Less Wrong, a sort of Internet update of Robespierre's good old Cult of Reason, Lenin's very rational Museums of Atheism, etc, etc. If you want my opinion on this subject, it is that - alas - there is no way of becoming reasonable, other than to be reasonable. Reason is wisdom. There is no formula for wisdom - and of all unwise beliefs, the belief that wisdom can be reduced to a formula, a prayer chant, a mantra, whatever, is the most ridiculous.
It's "humorless" that hurts the most, of course.
Out of interest, does anyone here have a positive unpacking of "wisdom" that makes it a useful concept, as opposed to "getting people to do what you want by sounding like an idealised parental figure"?
Is it simply "having built up a large cache of actually useful responses"?
Starting today, Monday 25 November 2013, some Stoic philosophers are running "Stoic Week", a week-long mass-participation "experiment" in Stoic philosophy and whether Stoic exercises make you happier.
There is more information on their blog.
To participate, you have to complete the initial exercises (baseline scores) by midnight today (wherever you are), Monday 25 November.
You know I really do feel like I am clinging bitterly to my priors and my meta at this point as I joked on twitter recnetly. I knew this was inevitable should our presence ever be noticed by anyone actually important like a journalist. What I didn't know was it would still hurt.
This emotion shows in my reply. Should delete it?
You shouldn't be upset by the initial media coverage, and I say this as someone who doesn't identify with neo-reactionary thought. Attacking new social movements is NOT inevitable. It is a sign of growth and a source of new adherents. Many social movements never pick up enough steam to receive negative coverage, and those movements are ineffective. Lots of people who have never heard of neo-reactionaries will read this article, note that parts of it are pretty obvious bullshit (even the parts that are intended to be most negative; lots of people privately believe that IQ and race are connected even if they are publicly unwilling to say anything of the sort), and follow the links out of interest. There are many very smart people that read TechCrunch, and don't automatically agree with a journalist just because they read an article. Obviously this is bad for Peter Thiel, who is basically just collateral damage, but it's most definitely good for neo-reactionaries.
Gandhi's famous quote ("First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.") is accurate as to the stages that a movement needs to pass through, although obviously one can be stopped at any given stage. I think we are already seeing these stages play out in the Men's Rights movement, which is further along the curve than neo-reaction.