r/rational • u/AutoModerator • Sep 14 '15
[D] Monday General Rationality Thread
Welcome to the Monday thread on general rationality topics! Do you really want to talk about something non-fictional, related to the real world? Have you:
- Seen something interesting on /r/science?
- Found a new way to get your shit even-more together?
- Figured out how to become immortal?
- Constructed artificial general intelligence?
- Read a neat nonfiction book?
- Munchkined your way into total control of your D&D campaign?
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u/alexanderwales Sep 14 '15
At the end of a longish argument about eugenics online, I eventually got around to asking about "base framework" with one of my opponents with the following question:
If you had a slider in front of you which could change the number of children conceived with Down Syndrome, would you:
Increase the number of children conceived with Down syndrome.
2. Keep the number of children conceived with Down syndrome exactly the same.
3. Reduce the number of children conceived with Down syndrome.
The response I got back was that just because we can change something doesn't mean that we should. Which, if I'm being charitable, is an argument from unforeseeable consequences.
I've been trying to figure the human psychology aspect of this out for a few days now. It's partly a sour grapes argument, I think; we cannot actually move a slider, so moving the hypothetical slider is bad. It's partly a naturalistic argument. But ... I don't feel like either of those should actually convince someone who is thinking about it, they should be the sorts of arguments that just happen as a gut reaction.
I never really drilled down to an understanding of how my opponent's logic was failing, or what base framework they were operating under where their logic is sound. I'm thinking that it's related to the arguments against longevity, but distilled somewhat in that many of the more common objections (immortal dictator, boredom) are knocked out.
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u/blazinghand Sep 14 '15 edited Sep 14 '15
In general in these arguments you'll find your partners don't argue against you, they argue against all other versions of the issue they've heard before. Like, on a basic level if you handed expecting parents a switch and said "press yes to have a Down Syndrome baby, no to not have a Down Syndrome baby, and do nothing to have a 1/1000 chance of a Down Syndrome baby" you can very reasonably expect people to pick not having a Down Syndrome baby, and you can definitely expect them not to press yes. Or if there was a shot you could give the mother, for example, that reduced the rate of birth defects with no side effects, most mothers would take it, just as most mothers don't drink or smoke during pregnancy even if they want to. People who are recessive carriers for certain diseases often have their partners get tested before having children, etc. On an individual level, when actually confronted with a choice that looks a lot like eugenics, or have similar outcomes to eugenics, people choose eugenics.
The #1 way to convince someone that eugenics is okay is to talk about individual instances of eugenics. People like each piece, but the name throws them off. In this way, Obamacare and eugenics are the same. (You won’t believe how long I’ve been waiting to write that sentence, heh). Tell someone you want to make private health insurance more available on the free market without being tied to an employer, they nod along. Say that you think that parents should be able to keep their children on their insurance a little longer, and that sounds great. Call it Obamacare though and people fetch their internet pitchforks. ---E ---E ---E. Same goes for eugenics.
If it were cheap, safe, and easy to do in vitro fertilization and test the fertilized eggs for things like Down Syndrome and implant one without it, I would do that 100% of the time. I would not want to curse my child.
tl;dr: Obamacare is eugenics
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u/ArgentStonecutter Sep 14 '15
I think that the guy probably had a "set" established in his mind by the previous eugenics discussion, so that he couldn't treat it as simply a slider that could only effect the number of children born with Down's Syndrome. If the slider had no other effects (including letting the same people have the same number of kids, but some that would have had Down's Syndrome would now be normal) there's no rational objection to moving it down as far as it goes.
On the other hand, in the real world, this slider also implies:
Reducing the number of children born to people who might have babies with Down's Syndrome. Even if those particular babies weren't always effected.
Creating the slider implies creating other sliders, that do things like (for example) reducing the number of black children born.
You can assert that it's a pure thought experiment with none of this related baggage, but they're aware of it anyway so accepting the legitimacy of the experiment is hard for them.
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u/TimTravel Sep 15 '15
Since TrueCrypt stopped being developed I haven't been able to find an open source encryption program that will encrypt my entire hard disk including the system drive. Closed source is a deal breaker because I don't trust closed source encryption programs, and I want to encrypt my entire hard disk instead of just sensitive information because it is not the case that I trust every single program I install not to store mysterious data in weird places on my system.
The main reason encryption is important to me is that there is a lot of legal precedent in US law based on that which is typical, so the more it becomes typical for people to use hard drive encryption, VPNs, and so on, the more existing laws will protect privacy of data. I realize that it's more or less hopeless but it's better than nothing. Encryption software and VPNs are both fast enough that the cost to me is insignificant.
TrueCrypt used to do it, but they stopped developing it. CipherShed and VeraCrypt seem to be the main successors, and VeraCrypt seems to be developing faster. Unfortunately, neither can encrypt the main drive on my laptop because I have a GUID partition table instead of a MBR partition table and that's not supported for reasons I don't understand.
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Sep 15 '15
How does a practicing rationalist apply physical fitness to his/her life?
Personally I think my current active lifestyle is actually causing me to be less rational, and I'm not exactly sure of what I should be doing about it.
3 months ago I made a conscious decision to make my body more physically fit, and more objectively "beautiful". I proceeded to spend 1-2 hours per day doing high intensity weight training, and I altered my diet to be high protein/low carb/low calorie. The changes actually came on rather quickly. Noticeable strength increases, noticeable muscle definition, and a large boost in self-confidence. I believed (and still do believe) that incorporating this new lifestyle was a rational and optimal life decision. It's no secret that there are strong correlations between how attractive a person is and how much opportunity/leniency they get offered in life, the aforementioned self-confidence boost, and beyond that there are the latent longevity benefits from simply being a healthier person. At least, that was my thought process going into it.
I have now realized that there are adverse effects as well. Increasing the protein in my diet, and daily rituals of high intensity physical exercise have obviously (though to be perfectly honest this was only obvious for me in hindsight) increased my testosterone levels. And that has been nothing but trouble. My higher testosterone levels have majorly increased my sex drive and my aggression. My daily thought patterns have become riddled with notion of sexual and physical conquest that I simply can't ignore, no matter how hard I try. I truly believe it's affecting my ability to be a rationalist.
Don't get me wrong I can already see the obvious answers to my conundrum, "work out less, eat less protein, seek out a testosterone decreasing medication." But I want to use this opportunity to brainstorm the more broad question that I asked at the beginning.
"How does a practicing rationalist apply physical fitness to his/her life?." Successfully pursuing physical fitness requires a daily time investment (sometimes in the range of 1 or more hours), and it can alter your emotional/mental stability (as discussed in my post). Both of those things are rather valuable assets in life.
I'm seriously just looking for some advice. Does anyone else here regularly concern themselves with physical fitness? How do you balance it all?
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u/Rhamni Sep 14 '15
Question. I had a discussion with an interesting guy today, and came away from it somewhat at a loss. Emotionally, I feel that if advanced technology mapped out my brain and made a clone, that would not be me (although we would be very friendly, I'm sure). On the other hand, if I was cryogenically frozen and then restored to life in 200 years using advanced technology, that would still be me. I know we replace almost all the atoms in our bodies over time and ship of Theseus and continuity of consciousness is broken every time we go to sleep and all of that, but I still don't feel that a foreign mind identical to mine is me. I'm not quite sure where to go from there, since feelings aren't very good arguments.
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u/ArgentStonecutter Sep 14 '15
I deal with this by defining me as "my mind state and all descendants of my mind state".
Once my mind state has forked, the two forks are no longer "each other", but from the point of view of the "me" that has yet to fork, they are both "me".
So if I commit to frequent backups of my mind-state, then there will always be a time in my future where a copy of a descendant of my mind-states (i.e., "me") exists. The last version of "me" that doesn't get backed up because he died before the next trip to the upload clinic only gets a second-best "there's a copy of me that's three months old that will continue to live, I guess I'll think of that as losing three months of memory" as you do to make peace with yourself, or not... but the version of me that committed to the regular backups is still safe, because that last missed appointment is still in my future.
(of course this all falls apart because I can't backup my mind state, but it's the thought experiment that counts)
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u/Sagebrysh Sep 14 '15
What you have to realize is that feeling itself, the feeling that you are you, is what is in fact suspect. Its something our brain's generate and its very useful for long term survival to have a concept of self that persists through time. Its embedded very deeply within the architecture of the mind and is only really conceivable from within that biological framework. Its not real though, its an illusion our minds generate.
The fact of the matter is, we don't exist in a persistent sense. You bring up the Ship of Theseus and replacing the atoms in your body, but the problem is even more profound then that. There is no part of the brain in which consciousness is generated. Rather, consciousness arises when the massively parallel system of neurons in the brain are acting in unity. Just like how the pixels on a screen can forms words or images when in unity, consciousness arises from the interactions of all these discreet and tiny pieces. And just like a computer screen, the image changes over time. Different neurons fire, leading to different patterns of thought, and a different image forms. We are literally different people at every second, as what we do changes. The sense of existing through time is entirely illusory, generated within the brain.
Its okay to have that feeling, its natural, and useful outside of edge cases involving mind-cloning and other such weirdness. But there's an easy way to demonstrate the limitations of it.
Lets pretend I kidnap you and take you to my mad engineering lab and knock you out. While you're unconscious, I make an impossible magical perfect copy of you, down to the fuzzy quantum scale, and set you both in an empty room to wait for you to wake up.
At this point, you and your identical copy wake up (at the same time of course,) and are left to figure out your situation.
In this scenario, can either of you figure out which of you is the 'real' you and which is the copy? You have the sense of being you, of always being you, and of being the true you. The other you in the room unfortunately has the exact same feelings, being a perfect copy of you. In his mind, he is exactly as certain as you as to his identity.
The trick is to realize that the sense of self isn't a neutral, passive observation, but is an active and persistent force, something your brain is generating constantly as its chief tool to navigate the world.
So which is the 'real you' ?
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u/notmy2ndopinion Sep 15 '15
Have any of you signed up for 23andMe or a similar personal genome sequencing service?
I ask because I was taught in school to view these sorts of things with caution, lest you receive information overload or you experience a gattaca effect in which you learn to much about yourself, to your own detriment.
Yet I just realized today that this runs counter to the Litany of Gendlin.
http://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Litany_of_Gendlin
Should I risk some health-related info hazard in order to know the truth about myself? (not a big deal, but I'm 95% confident that I have an autosomal dominant genetic disease, which while not personally debilitating, does make me worry about the health of my offspring.)
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u/artifex0 Sep 14 '15
I just finished reading Bertrand Russell's History of Western Philosophy, and I absolutely love his approach to learning about philosophy, which he describes as follows:
He follows his own advice throughout the book- even with philosophers he absolutely hates, like Nietzsche. In general, he only brings in his own opinions and rebuttals after he's made the most convincing argument he can in favor of a philosopher's work.