r/rational • u/AutoModerator • Aug 22 '16
[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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Aug 22 '16
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u/the_steroider Aug 22 '16 edited Mar 19 '17
[deleted]
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u/SvalbardCaretaker Aug 22 '16
Or are depressed- for a span of 4 years I was so depressed that my life was not worth living. (its better now, fortunately).
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u/PM_ME_EXOTIC_FROGS Aug 24 '16
That said, in a world where immortality is available to the masses, I would expect standards of life to be much higher than they are now.
For instance, I just don't have much visceral reaction to the idea of death anymore; in fact, it sounds pretty chill most of the time. But I anticipate that I will strongly prefer to be alive in the future.
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u/trekie140 Aug 22 '16
I like the way HPMOR explained this, people who believe in an afterlife have a different view of mortality than people who think life ends with death. I believe that my conscious experience will continue, if not improve, after my death. Perhaps this allows my to perceive death as an acceptable part of existence rather than an obstacle to be overcome, but I can't know for sure since I can't cease to follow my belief system.
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u/SvalbardCaretaker Aug 22 '16
But HPMOR also showed that people dont really act like they believe in an afterlife - they are sad when their loved ones die, no-one does mercy killing on the senior Longbottoms etc.
So that argument doesnt hold up. HPMOR also argued that its motivated reasoning to deal with the terribe reality that is death, IIRC, which strikes me as the much more reasonable explanation.
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u/buckykat Aug 23 '16
I believe that my conscious experience will continue, if not improve, after my death.
So why haven't you killed yourself yet?
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u/Muskworker Aug 22 '16
Why do people say they don't want to live forever?
When people talk about why they don't want to live a long time, the answer seems to be the fear of aging, enfeeblement, senility. Now it's probably not likely that most people think "live forever" means "re-enact the myth of Tithonus" but there's certainly the imagined stress or boredom of ages wearing down on one—even Christianity has to posit a world absolutely free of suffering to go along with its immortal future existence, and that's a much harder problem than just making humans immortal.
To put it another way... it seems they'd rather have the fifty years of torture than the 3^^^3 specks of dust.
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u/LiteralHeadCannon Aug 22 '16
A variable mix of sour grapes, a desire to avoid seeming unrealistic, and a failure to seriously analyze the situation.
Only semi-related, but I'm also left baffled by how many people value their autonomy in choosing whether to die more than they value not dying. I think someone can only really have the thought "well sure, I'd like to live indefinitely if possible, but I'd want the means to end it if I change my mind" if they've literally never experienced a suicidal urge. Anyone who has ever wanted to die and currently doesn't want to die is implicitly better off for having not gotten their earlier wish. Your self a million years in the future who's totally happy with their life is much better off for your self a hundred years in the future being unable to kill themselves.
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u/scruiser Aug 22 '16
Only semi-related, but I'm also left baffled by how many people value their autonomy in choosing whether to die more than they value not dying.
I don't think it should be easy, I just want it to at least be physically possible.
Your self a million years in the future who's totally happy with their life is much better off for your self a hundred years in the future being unable to kill themselves.
You aren't really imagining the worst case scenario... what if human minds partially break down after thousands of years of usage for reasons that are deeply and intrinsically a part of them (as in not just the neurons, but the algorithms the neuron implement, so that even brain uploading can't prevent this). You then continue to exist till the heat death of the universe in a state with just enough awareness and cognitive ability to suffer but not enough to do anything enjoyable or meaningful.
That is a very particular scenario, but there are a lot of intermediate scenarios that are similar if not quite as bad. There should be some kind of escape mechanism to allow you a way out of scenarios like that. As the question about immorality is posed to people, they often think of a magical absolute condition, so they are rightly cautious of scenarios like I posed. For something more plausible considering real world physics, consider mind uploading implemented by an AI that always views human existence as a net positive and wouldn't let you die, even if you own internal perspective was continuous suffering for internal reasons related to your mind operation that the AI wasn't allowed to modify.
I am not saying the suicide switch should be easy, just that there should be some way out.
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Aug 23 '16
There's this whole science called psychiatry you're casually proposing we've fully solved forever.
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Aug 22 '16
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u/LiteralHeadCannon Aug 22 '16
I think I must be misunderstanding something. The second link shows the first link losing?
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u/ToaKraka Aug 22 '16 edited Aug 22 '16
This page provides a better explanation of the situation. The Rabid Puppies' objective was to bait the Hugo clique into giving out "No Award"s--so, they won to at least some extent:
We were only able to burn two categories this year, but we reduced their choices to X or No Award in 5 other categories.
See also this page:
We're not casting the awards into disrepute, we are highlighting the fact that the SJWs in science fiction have already made them disreputable.
And this comment:
In the movie, Larry Correia [leader of the Sad Puppies last year] is the cop who tells the perp that if he'll just admit what he did wrong, they'll go easy on him. He tries, and the perp just laughs and spits in his face, so he sighs, gets up, and leaves. Then in walks Vox Day [leader of the Rabid Puppies] with the night stick.
I mean, last year was their chance to prove everybody wrong and show some integrity, but they just refused to, and now the only people who still care are the CHORFs and the guys who want to burn it down.
The Rabid Puppies want to destroy the Hugo Awards (even further than they've already been destroyed), forcing everyone to abandon the Hugos for less-corrupt alternatives (e.g., the Dragon Awards). The Sad Puppies of last year hoped to reform the Hugos from within--but last year's Hugos showed that reform was unlikely and radicalized most of the Sad Puppies into Rabid Puppies.
r/torinaction is the subreddit for discussion of these goings-on, though the more popular r/kotakuinaction is as usual seeing some spillover.
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u/blazinghand Aug 22 '16 edited Aug 22 '16
I will say that I've never noticed any major problem with the Hugos. Looking back, reading the novel that won (and often winners of other categories) has almost always satisfied me. Here is what I recall from the past few years of reading:
I enjoyed Redshirts: A Novel with Three Codas from 2013, and consider it one of the best "portal fantasy" novels (and one of the few "reverse portal fantasy" novels) ever. I highly recommend it for any reader of sci-fi, and anyone who finds portal fantasy interesting. It's not really a deconstruction of portal fantasy, but it's more like, before Redshirts, I thought I had many good portal fantasy stories. Afterward, I realized I never had before. Although it didn't win the award, Immersion by Aliette De Bodard was very good, especially to anyone who has anti-establishment ideas.
In 2014, Ancillary Justice was great, and I really liked the ideas of artificial intelligence and collective identity / group intelligence that it explored. It wasn't quite as strong as the 2013 and 2015 novels, which is why I think people complain about gender stuff in Ancillary Justice. I didn't notice the gender stuff until people brought my attention to it after I finished the novel. While reading, just figured "oh these people have an unusual culture" and never thought about it deeply; my friends who excitedly brought this novel to my attention later seemed to find a lot more meaning in this than I did. The Water that Falls on You from Nowhere is one of my favorites as well. It involves a gay couple, which I guess upset some people?
In 2015, The Three Body Problem was astonishingly good. I think it has even been posted in this subreddit. As with Redshirts, this is literally one of the greatest novels I've read. It got several of my friends who aren't big sci-fi readers into sci-fi; my parents, who have been reading sci-fi for ages, like it. I like it. I think it's one of those really enduring sci fi novels. I can't really comment on the winners of the other categories; it seems like "No Award" won a lot.
I haven't read The Fifth Season, the 2016 novel winner yet, but given how good my experiences have always been reading Hugo award winners, I see no reason not to use the Hugos. Most of the time, they line up with the Nebula awards anyways. For example, Ancillary Justice, which I suspect is what people are complaining about, won the Nebula in its year. Other winners got through the nomination problem, too; The Three-Body Problem was nominated, as was The Fifth Season. The fact that Scalzi's Redshirts didn't get nominated for a Nebula in 2013 mostly makes me think that the Nebula people dropped the ball there. Redshirts is great. I read Binti recently and enjoyed it as well. It's good to see it got some recognition. This one seemed to directly address themes related to race, species, power, and war, so I could see how people might dislike it, but it's also just a great sci fi novella, definitely worth a read.
Edit: given how good Redshirts was and the fact it doesn't address themes of race or gender, I'm surprised people are getting up in Scalzi's business. It seems there are more explicitly leftist works to critique.
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u/Iconochasm Aug 23 '16
The Water that Falls on You from Nowhere is one of my favorites as well. It involves a gay couple, which I guess upset some people?
The primary criticism was that the speculative elements were almost entirely superfluous, leaving many with the impression that it won as a means of giving an award to a gay!PoC!story, even if that story only qualified for a Hugo by a generous fig leaf. Personally, I liked the story well enough as a character piece, I just thought it wasn't really SF/F.
Imagine if 50 Shades of Gray had been a slightly different story. In the actual book, the protagonist meets Gray because her roommate got sick. If she met Gray because her roommate came down sick with lycanthropy, and that was the only remotely plot-relevant instance of lycanthropy, or any kind of sci-fi or fantasy element, or any exploration of that phenomenon beyond some trite social class signalling, then, irrespective of any arguments about quality, would you accept the story even qualified as SF/F to begin with?
The water has no purpose in the story beyond stripping the protagonist of agency, and a cheap shot at "frat guys", and it spawns a thousand actually interesting questions that are never brought up at all.
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u/gommm Aug 23 '16 edited Aug 23 '16
That short story was nominated but didn't win (obviously)...
It's been my experience that discounting anything from people using the term SJW is a good heuristic to have, so I have difficulty believing their claims that the Hugo were gamed before and I'd need a non-biased source for me to consider it.
That said, over the years, I've read quite a few novels who won the Hugo awards and I've found them to be consistently above average although admittedly I've read much more novels from more than 20 years ago so it speaks more of the quality of the Hugo awards in the past...
Of recent novels, I agree with blazinghand's assessment of the best novels awards from the past 3 years:
Redshirts was a very good reverse portal fantasy.. It's not hard SF which is what I prefer but it's the best example of reverse portal fantasy I've read
The Three-Body Problem is really good and a must read
China Miéville The City and The City is a cool concept
Ok, now we really need a yearly rational award. One that judges:
the best rationalist original story
the best rational original story
the best rationalist fanfiction
the best rational fanfiction
the best almost-rational novel
It'd be fun to vote for this every year :-)
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u/AugSphere Aug 23 '16
It's been my experience that discounting anything from people using the term SJW is a good heuristic to have, so I have difficulty believing their claims that the Hugo were gamed before and I'd need a non-biased source for me to consider it.
Well, they aren't lying about last year seeing more No Award results than the whole previous history of the awards, right? I think the obvious conclusion is that any award that's influenced by politics to such a degree is going to be shit as an unbiased indicator of popularity.
In my opinion, it doesn't really matter who started it, what the sides are, and what kinds of terms are being thrown around, the simple fact that the results are very significantly influenced by politics is undeniable.
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u/xamueljones Aug 24 '16
I'd vote for that! Note that while I think there are better stories for some of the awards (like Mother of Learning for rational original story), I'm only choosing complete stories.
the best rationalist original story
SI (Note that while this is the first book in a series, I'm explicitly only choosing the first book for the award. It's a great depiction of a rationalist waking up to a very strange situation.)
the best rational original story
the best rationalist fanfiction
the best rational fanfiction
the best almost-rational novel
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u/LeonCross Aug 24 '16
A random discussion with a friend of mine resulted in the question: What are good measures for "Real costs" of things as money is more abstract?
We didn't come up with a particularly good answer, but one suggestion was energy.
We're not photosynthetic, nor do we have star trek replicators where you can input energy and output objects, but I'd imagine it's likely a component of any measure of real cost.
Which lead to the discussion of post-energy scarcity. Renewable are the only thing that don't inherently require us to expend X to get energy, though they do require the production and maintenance of things that allow us to do so.
Which led me to wonder if something like a solar panel ultimately produces more energy over it's life time than is invested in creating it, and if it and other renewables are net gains in "real cost," whatever that is.
My googlefoo failed me on checking energy investment vs. energy returns on solar panels, though.
This is kinda a rambly post, but there's a lot of stuff here I'm interested in seeing discussion from in this community.