Those Difficult Things

This was first demonstrated in a clear way by Alan M. Turing (1912-1954), whose 1936 paper laid the foundations of the earth

(Source: kingjamesprogramming)

• 29 May 2015
• 220

towardsagentlerworld:

i just learned how to see light polarization!

• 22 May 2015
• 9

• #visual illusion#not much of an illusion#but still a cool thing

an-animal-imagined-by-poe:

Things that happen in the aftermath of Worm and nothing, including canon, will convince me otherwise:

Marquis unofficially adopts Riley, Amy is initially horrified but they bond over figuring out the neurological effects of mass shard death in parahumans following golden morning and the three of them become a semi-functional family unit.

Theo Anders converts to Judaism.

Colin’s cybernetics grant him functional immortality and he and Dragon stay together and nothing bad ever happens to them again.

• 16 May 2015
• 25

• #parahumans#agreed on all counts

Anonymous asked: Sort of a silly question, but what was your internet community journey? For instance, my first community was fanfiction net, mostly HP and danny phantom stories with frequent lurking on deviantart and 4chan for fanart. Later I shifted to reddit and tumblr, with occasional forrays into lesswrong and some other hubs of interest. Now its just tumblr and twitter pretty much, though I visit other places. Or if you don't want to get into all of that, what was just your first internet community? :)

theunitofcaring:

No that’s not a silly question it’s really cool and now I want all my followers to reblog with internet community journeys. 

 I hung out on Yahoo! Answers for a couple years (12-14), lurked various advice columns because I find them fascinating, got into Harry Potter fanfiction on fanfiction.net, found Methods of Rationality and through that LessWrong, where there are embarrassing posts as a record of my age-17 Eliezer-fangirl stage, got into the tumblr Silmarillion fandom, burned out of the tumblr Silmarillion fandom, got into tumblr SJ, and wound up here. The only sites I read reliably now are tumblr, slatestarcodex, and aforementioned advice columns. 

This tracks only slightly with my special interests during the relevant time periods, which from high school forward were the TV show 24 , Crichton/King/Grisham generic adult thrillers, Christian apocalyptic fiction, LessWrong, the Silmarillion, the manosphere and neoreaction, Clara, the Silmarillion again, social justice, and Current Special Interest which is a secret for obvious reasons. 

My first community, at age 13 or so, was the His Dark Materials fandom; I helped run one of the major forums for a few years. That got me involved in   █████████████ and in the support/extensions community of the phpBB forum software we used. At some point I also roleplayed on a small Xenogears / Final Fantasy board, now mercifully defunct. 

In college I found reddit, and from reddit a stray link took me to Overcoming Bias while the Sequences were being posted. I lurked there and then lurked at LessWrong but sort of faded out (I didn’t feel like I had anything to contribute, and I had IRL stuff going on). Later I ran across slatestarcodex, and that renewed my interest in the rationalist blogosphere – this time with marginally more talking. I’m also still on reddit, though I don’t venture outside of /r/haskell and /r/asktransgender much.

• 15 May 2015
• 60

• #participatory meme#internet communities

“Going further, it is not overly surprising that the below is legal C++ even though it may look ludicrous to the untrained eye”

“The order of code generation is normally not observable, but when we are dealing with changing the global state of constant-expressions, it suddenly matters a lot”

• 13 May 2015
• 1

• #quotes

towardsagentlerworld:

The problem with the conventional definition of “adulthood” is that it conflates a set of healthy traits (self-directedness, planning for the future, emotional resilience, analytical thinking) with a set of neutral-or-unhealthy traits (conforming to societal norms, restraining one’s emotional expressiveness, valuing beauty over cuteness). 

I want the healthy traits of adulthood. I want to set goals and execute plans; I want to remain resilient in the face of stress; I want to think carefully and analytically about my decisions; I want to purposely and deliberately build a good life.

I also want to appreciate how cute my friends are; I want to overtly express affection and create happy interpersonal interaction; I want to enjoy physical touch and hugs and cuddles; I want to ignore social norms when obeying them would make my life worse.

Setting goals and executing plans makes me happy. Jumping up and down when I see something cute also makes me happy. Both of these things make my life better, so why would I want to get rid of either of them?

(via yxoque)

• 6 May 2015
• 385

The Prosthetic Pigeon

About week ago, I assembled a haptic compass. It’s a strap that goes around your ankle with a little (~5cm x 5cm x 2cm) box of electronics velcroed onto it:

In the strap are 8 vibration motors like the one in a cell phone, and the north-most motor is constantly vibrating. In effect, the device gives you an extra sense: a coarse-grained knowledge of your absolute orientation. 

Or at least that’s the idea. The small study [pdf] that inspired it showed mixed results, with some subjects able to integrate the tactile information into their spatial processing much more thoroughly than others. The subjects whose performance on navigation tasks improved the most also reported some surprising new sensory experiences:

I was intuitively aware of the direction of my home or of my office. For example, I would wait in line in the cafeteria and spontaneously think: I’m living over there.

Interestingly,  when I take off the belt at night I still feel the vibration: When I turn to the other side, the vibration is moving too–this is a fascinating feeling!

So far I haven’t experienced anything dramatic, though I do get some phantom vibrations after taking the device off. Unlike the subjects in the study, I haven’t been wearing mine continuously; it’s a little loud (I should glue or tape the corners of the acrylic case and the battery wire, which both sometimes buzz) and the vibration can get a little too intense.

Still, being able to cast Know Direction at will is a pretty neat superpower.

• 6 May 2015
• 6

• #transhumanism#sensory augmentation#the prosthetic pigeon

Reblog with your personality results.

Myers-Briggs: INTJ
Alignment: Neutral Good
Kinsey Scale: Non-sexual
Hogwarts House: Ravenclaw
Temperament: Sanguine (???)
Bending Type: Waterbender

(Source: krimsonkiwi, via ozymandias271)

• 1 May 2015
• 121605

• #usually I get INTP but the margin is small either way#kinsey 6 and gray-A would be a more informative answer#sanguine does not fit AT ALL#I am a depression-prone risk-averse recluse not a pleasure-seeking charismatic people-person

Good things, last weekend edition:

- Read Saga, a truly wonderful comic. You cannot beat Lying Cat in a sidekick-off. She is simply the best there is. 

- Learned to fly an RC plane. I managed to flip over the plane a few times and then to not flip it over for a while. (The plane had no ailerons, so everyone was very perplexed by the flipping stage.)

- Learned to solder, and finally built the DIY electronics project that has been taunting me from its little bag since 2011 when a friend and I ordered ourselves a pair of them in a fit of enthusiasm and ill sense. 

• 29 Apr 2015

• #good things

Anonymous asked: I think my sensory issues might be causing dissociation. Is that a thing that happens, or are the two problems most likely to be independent? (Sorry, I realize you are probably the wrong person to ask about this, but I wasn't sure what to google.)

theunitofcaring:

I don’t really have any idea but it seems worth trying to figure out. People who experience dissociation, can you describe what it feels like to you and what you think causes it for you?

For me: I do not think I experienced dissociation before developing the ED. Now I experience it when I’m stressed or anxious and reminded of the fact I have an actual physical body. It feels like intense awareness of embodiedness and how terrible it is, accompanied by losing track of time and losing my capacity to work on tasks or focus or orient myself spatially. I usually crawl under my weighted blanket and daydream (about other people; I don’t feature in the scenarios). It is not always obvious when this feeling starts but it’s very obvious when it stops because the way I experience tactile sensation changes very abruptly when I snap back into my head. 

Anon has probably long stopped watching this post by now, but this has been sitting in my drafts and I have anecdata to share. Here’s what dissociation feels like and looks like to me:

• I feel like the conscious part of myself is very small and the world is very far away. It’s like ‘I’ am a stone at the bottom of a lake of dimly-lit memories and plans and emotions and sensations, and way at the surface, tiny and a little blurred, I can see what’s happening around me and what I’m doing. 
  
• There’s a distinctive emotional state, but I don’t know a word for it. It’s an… aggressively neutral feeling? It sounds like a quiet 60Hz mains hum.
• I think of something to say, and a minute later I can’t remember whether I already said the thing or just thought about saying it.
• Deliberate action takes effort, and can also have false starts where I try to do a thing (pen is rolling off desk! catch it!) and instead just imagine doing the thing (it fell? but I… oh.). Scripted or habitual actions (responding perfunctorily to questions, walking between familiar places) aren’t impaired once they’re started. 
• My body doesn’t seems real, or doesn’t seem to belong to me. Instead it feels insubstantial or like I’m looking on from beside myself and operating it by remote control. 
• It feels like something terrible would happen if anyone touched me – I would pop like a soap bubble, or a mountain suspended over my head would fall. Actually being touched is shiver-inducing but not quite so dramatic.
  
• I lose track of time when I’m not doing something. I might have no recollection of the last 20 minutes and the last 5 subway stops, or I might finish rinsing my hair and just stand in the shower until the water gets cold. (Okay, I do that last one all the time, but usually I’m daydreaming and enjoying it instead of just… entering the void.)
• Partway through a day I’ll suddenly ‘wake up’ and feel suddenly more aware and embodied, like I’d been sleepwalking up to that point. I remember the things that happened, but I don’t remember having experienced them – it’s like turning a page and suddenly realizing that someone said something to you two paragraphs ago. 

Not all of these happen every time. in particular, the experience components can occur without some or all of the functional impairments. Feeling like I’ve ‘snapped out of it’ doesn’t preclude dissociating again shortly afterward; the cumulative effect is like being a stone skipping across the surface of things, touching down briefly while time rushes past. (This is not fun.)

My dissociation is/was usually triggered by (at least one of) stress, depression or dysphoria. I first experienced it around the onset of puberty (there were also other things going on at the time), and then it came back with a vengeance during college; it’s been brief and infrequent since I started HRT almost a year ago (but all three factors have gotten much better in the last year, so it’s hard to attribute it to any one thing).

I do experience a somewhat similar mental state from sensory causes – it happens reliably if there are two TVs (with sound) and people talking*, but sometimes it takes less to trigger it. I get the same sense of distance, feeling of smallness and disconnect from my body, and I find reading or focusing on my thoughts impossible. But the sensation is frustrating and spiky and unpleasant, I have difficulty doing even mindless tasks like filling out forms, and no matter what I focus on I’m very aware of the slow passage of time. It also ends without any ‘snapping awake’ feeling as soon as I escape the stimuli. So I’m hesitant to call this dissociation, even if it has some features in common. 

• 29 Apr 2015
• 11

• #my brain#dissociation cw#brain debugging#if you are wondering what kind of terrible place has two tvs#it's mostly waiting rooms and restaurants with bars

feministjewishblogger asked: wait, sorry to bother you, why does your eudaimonia include grief and pain?

ozymandias271:

taymonbeal:

ozymandias271:

wirehead-wannabe:

nuclearspaceheater:

ozymandias271:

oh come on I was hoping I could just handwave at people and they would let me get away with an extremely unclear Thing I’m Maximizing

okay so: clearly the thing we should be maximizing is not pleasure. The most pleasure most people can experience is orgasms, but a life of masturbating constantly is generally agreed upon to be unsatisfactory and, in fact, unhappy. I am not precisely sure what the “happiness” I think people should have is, but it’s clearly not just physical pleasure (although physical pleasure is an important component). So I use “eudaimonia” to prevent confusion with pleasure-maximizing utilitarianism. 

Now, in my own life, I notice that there are certain kinds of sadness that seem to contribute to my overall flourishing. I think it would be bad for me to take a pill that means that I don’t feel sad when someone dies; I think it’s better to miss people I love when I don’t interact with them. Similarly, I appreciate pushing myself through my own limits when exercising and the intense sensation of a good flogging. So I suspect that at least in the case of Ozys– and probably in the case of nonOzys– eudaimonia would involve some kinds of sadness and pain (although not other kinds– depression can go fuck itself). 

I don’t know where, if anywhere, I’ve heard this, but I think there is also something of an emotional analog to the Litany of Tarski, “If I encounter something happy, I wish to feel happy. If I encounter something sad, I wish to feel sad.”

This creates problems, vis-a-vis how the amount of things worth being sad or distressed about, including but not limited to the death of every human in history, if properly “appreciated,” would permanently turn most humans into despairing husks of their former selves, so a degree of “it’s in the past don’t care lol” is necessary, but I feel there may be a possible compromise. Maybe have a Remembrance Day every century or so where the people are briefly able to experience the full force of the emotions they would feel if every tragedy of the universe affected them personally, if desired. Naturally, this would require the disabling of the mind’s vulnerability to long-term trauma.

To nuclearspaceheater: Wait, are you treating “things worth being sad about” as a one-place function here? Is there an inherent property of sad-worthiness written in xml tags? Isn’t sadness just a tool used to help motivate rather than an end in and of itself?

To Ozy: I agree that there’s probably a difference between “subjective experience we would consider enjoyable” and the cluster of things we generally categorize as pleasure. My objection is that it still seems as though you should be able to pseudo-wirehead people to continuously feel the intense sensation of a good flogging. It would seem that in order to oppose pseudo-wireheading you would have to either take the position that different types of subjective experience are not commensurable in terms of value, that there’s some value to subjective experience changing over time, or that there are reasons you would want to be sad other than because it makes your subjective experience better. For the last one, see my reply to nuclearspaceheater above. if you believe either of the first two, can you explain why? (Or if there’s some fourth option I haven’t thought of.)

Well, I mean, I don’t think most people would consider the subjective experience of a good flogging to be a happy life either.

My definition of eudaimonia is really handwavey and really not very well-operationalized, but I do notice that change in subjective experience over time seems to be a basic requirement for what most people would consider to be a happy life (necessary but not sufficient). I suspect eudaimonia involves facts about the world rather than facts about one’s emotional state as well (i.e. having friends who are also sapient, genuine struggle where there’s a possibility of losing). 

Now I’m confused. In what sense is this hedonic utilitarianism? Or do you no longer consider that label applicable to your ethical framework? Do you have a specific objection to preference utilitarianism?

Why doesn’t preference utilitarianism result in tiling the universe with people who want the lightspeed limit to stay where it is really really hard?

Like, Jesus, that’s worse than regular wireheading.

Also preference utilitarianism tends to treat preferences (even terminal preferences) as unchangeable, which is totally alien to my experience; it’s relatively easy to modify my own preferences and those of people I know well.

There are types of preference utilitarianism that don’t have these specific problems. They are

- path dependent. Don’t tile the universe with lightspeed-likers because nobody (right now) wants that.

- meta-preference aware. It’s good to change people’s preferences to be more like the preferences they want to have.

There are other problems, though. (e.g. if an asteroid wiped out humanity it would be morally right to fix that, even if nobody was at the moment alive to prefer it.)

But also share Taymon’s confusion. (Standard) hedonic utilitarianism assigns value to each experience-moment (based on how pleasurable it is) and aggregates somehow. Eudaimonic utilitarianism also seems to be aggregative, but it has a different fundamental value-having thing (a life history in context, maybe?) and a different way of assigning value to those units (some complicated function of the person’s experiences and their interactions with the rest of the universe). These are kind of similar in the the grand scheme of all ethical systems, but as utilitarianisms they’re not that close.

• 28 Apr 2015
• 44

• #utilitarianism#unreal ethics#please correct me if I've misunderstood

jadagul:

wirehead-wannabe:

ozymandias271:

did you know that romantic kissing is not a human universal

“ In one such study, young women reported using the kiss as a mate-assessment tactic”

Wait, people actually do that? What exactly is being assessed, other than how good the person is at kissing? Is kissing ability indicative of some other trait that these women are concerned about?

I’d guess/assume biochemical compatibility.  Some people just smell/taste better.

Online dating in 10 years: mail in a cheek swab to find matches with dissimilar major histocompatibility complex genes?

• 28 Apr 2015
• 53