[HN Gopher] What you can't imagine clearly, you value less
___________________________________________________________________
What you can't imagine clearly, you value less
Author : dnetesn
Score : 172 points
Date : 2022-11-05 11:32 UTC (11 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (nautil.us)
(TXT) w3m dump (nautil.us)
| MadScott wrote:
| "Lee and his colleagues confirmed this by looking at people's
| brain activity with an fMRI when they're making decisions about
| the future. They used a brain decoder to detect a "neural
| signature of the vividness of prospective thought"
|
| What twaddle. fMRI will tell you quite a bit about blood flow
| etc. but "brain decoder" is bullshit. It's like taking a thermal
| image of the primary PCB and saying you've just backed all of the
| operating system and secondary code out of the image.
|
| The author will continue to push the button, write down the
| number and have a career, but imagine the future harm they're
| doing by furthering such an appallingly fraudulent approach.
| joe__f wrote:
| I've seen people make that analogy before and I do think it has
| merit. As far as I'm aware it's pretty much the standard
| approach in neuroscience though and not special to these
| authors
| menotyou wrote:
| I am an aphant, I can not imagine anything.
|
| While I can appreciate to have a good income and always had good
| paying jobs, I was never really interested in making a career and
| becoming filthy rich. Possibly because I can not imagine myself
| in this situation.
|
| On the other hand I was always better then others on making long
| term strategic plans.
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aphantasia
| alar44 wrote:
| I'm so sick of hearing this. You can imagine things. That's not
| even what Aphantasia is.
| phao wrote:
| I've just spent the last 30min-1h looking this up. I think I
| might have a form of this... Mostly, I can't really picture
| stuff. I thought that was just everyone.
|
| Gotta find out more about this!
| lob_it wrote:
| Willful ignorance explains methane with climate change, the opiod
| epidemic and even inferior calories and the correlation to
| obesity (high fructose corn syrup in beverages or where it does
| not belong for example).
|
| Many 21st century innovations replace/supersede/override/make
| moribund and verify why hypothesis, theory and fact was agreed
| to, just as they have done in centuries past.
|
| Working with incorrect data has all kinds of random effects. The
| lead in fuels could have lowered IQ enough for the brain to not
| even be in the present :p
|
| https://www.discovermagazine.com/the-sciences/20-of-the-grea...
|
| https://www.npr.org/2021/08/30/1031429212/the-world-has-fina...
|
| I kinda laughed at the fiction genre comments. Its a very simple
| analogy....
|
| Doo doo comes out of my butt. Aliens have the same mouth and same
| ass :)
| chiefalchemist wrote:
| > If you're smart, people say, you should work toward a good
| future, sacrificing fun and pleasure in the present.
|
| Yeah, this is the conventional wisdom, but that doesn't make it
| right. Life is a tricky beast. You can do "all the right things"
| - and many of us do - and still have suboptimal outcomes.
|
| Furthermore, thinking about the future is a luxury of leisure.
| That is, day to day, when the vast majority of your energy is
| focused on survival, the future is not a priority. It is
| literally the least of your worries. The future can't feed you,
| etc. Agreed, that's a cycle that is self-defeating. But breaking
| out of such a defensive shell is counter to how we're wired.
| Possible? Yes but extremely difficult under persistent pressure
| and immediate real life stress.
|
| Even in the First World there are plenty living a defensive
| lifestyle. The future? That's someone else's.
| kjkjadksj wrote:
| The only truth is in personal hedonism I am convinced.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| Yeah, the kid who eats 2 marshmallows gets fat 30 years later,
| the one who doesn't eat marshmallows at all ends up ding the
| best.
| club_tropical wrote:
| Behold, one of the most dangerous and toxic forms of stupid: the
| LABCOAT-FLASHER. Do not fall for the verbal trickeries and
| hypotheticals - they are the syntactic sugar masking various
| POISONS:
|
| 1) There is no "you" that is meaningfully apart from "your
| brain". This trickery is meant to dissociate you from your body
| and backdoor sneak-in the labcoat-flasher as a co-conspiritor
| against yourself. It is every bit as gaslighting as a mom saying
| "why your hands don't want to clean your room".
|
| 2) Crystal ball, aka "if you knew you wouldn't get caught" or "if
| you knew a child would get harmed". These are always bad faith,
| 100% or the time, no exceptions. Nobody has ever experienced a
| crystal ball like this. NO GOD, of ANY faith, has ever made
| guarantees like this. The only thing this trickery is meant to
| serve is for the labcoat-flasher to control the imaginary future
| via the imaginary crystal ball and PROSECUTE YOU NOW for
| transgressions _in his imagination_. This is the girlfriend mad
| you for cheating on her in her dream and demanding you grovel at
| her feet for an apology.
|
| 3) This one is harder, because it sounds good, but it is worth
| making explicit because it is used against you as a form of
| control: human egalitarianism. See, nobody _actually_ believes
| this, not in the here and now among the living 7 billion humans
| _let alone_ all the imaginary descendents for centuries to come.
| A true and complete belief in this would make you a LITERAL
| SLAVE, spending every second and every disposable income on
| sponsoring the mass of humanity unrelated to you. The labcoat-
| flasher himself doesn't believe this either, but he hopes you
| won't focus on _him_ - no, he will start with your well-meaning
| and generous (if ultimately strictly-speaking untrue) belief that
| all humans should be equal and will take your benevolence,
| stretch it "to its logical conclusion" far beyond it was ever
| meant to go, wrap it up around your throat and CHOKE you with it.
| This is the girlfriend demanding you take a second job to buy her
| the $100,000 crocodile skin Hermes Birkin purse she wants because
| that is her love language and you said you cared about her- or do
| you not love her?
|
| Mendacious to its core, this kind of manipulative gaslighting
| rhetoric they boldly call "research" is the parochial pastime of
| labcoat-flashers like this Sangil "Arthur" Lee. It is a step in
| their vain chase for tenure or funding or some Young Researcher
| Award (TM). It never did and it never will have anything to do
| with reality or truth or any honest pursuit of such.
| jasmer wrote:
| The premise of the article is a bit more simple: things we can
| imagine more clearly, have more meaning to us.
|
| It's very simply articulated using concept of 'describing' vs.
| 'seeing' vs. 'doing'.
|
| It's hard for us to empathize with soldiers fighting wars, or
| refugees fleeing them - but when someone shows us pictures, or
| better yet, tells us their authentic story, it becomes
| visceral, and therefore we give legitimacy to the situation.
| lo_zamoyski wrote:
| Indeed, that was a strange diatribe that seems to go way
| beyond the content of the article (which does flirt with some
| neurobabble and dubious philosophy here and there, I opine,
| but I see nothing that would merit the terror-laden response
| of the OP). If we focus on the central claim concerning
| imagination and discard the rest, we can still have an
| interesting discussion. Worth mentioning is John Henry
| Newman's "A Grammar of Assent"[0] which begins precisely with
| a discussion of what he called notional and real assent which
| relate how we assent to propositions with what you might call
| the associated "vividness" of experience.
|
| [0] https://www.newmanreader.org/works/grammar/
| __MatrixMan__ wrote:
| I think the bigger problem with #3 is not that nobody buys the
| equality claim, but that we accept the premise.
|
| If all humans were equal, there would be only one human. That's
| how equality works
|
| The underlying claim is actually that all humans are of equal
| value. Yet there's no clear way to map humanity onto the number
| line. No generally accepted evaluation function. Egalitarianism
| declares such a function and then leaves it lying around for
| oppressors to define.
|
| This makes us weak against attacks where we're pitted against
| each other under the oversight of some master and we accept the
| deal because it makes our type of people more valuable than
| some boogeyman-type of person. This works because once we
| accept that there is an evaluation function, as you say, nobody
| buys that it maps us all to the same point.
| adamisom wrote:
| Wow, for a diatribe on bad-faith, this is precisely that. e.g.
| You say the labcoat-flasher doesn't really believe in
| egalitarianism either... People profess desires to be a certain
| way (sometimes 'moral' sometimes not) despite not being that
| way, but we don't call that "fake"; humans are complex, and the
| point of adopting any higher-order principle (again, whether
| 'moral' or not) is that your actions start... pointing in that
| direction more. Incrementally so, not absolutely. Truly, every
| sentence you wrote could be similarly torn apart, but it's not
| worth my time.
| coldtea wrote:
| 1) There's also your body, in the arms and legs and torso
| sense, which is you, but it's not your brain. There's also your
| non conscious part (whether you want to include a Freud style
| subconscious, or autonomous functioning parts that reach a
| decision way before it has registered as a conscious though)
| which is your brain, but not exactly "you" as you think of you.
| Plus all kind of body-produced chemicals and hormones that
| influence you, despite not being "your brain" - they're still
| you, since you can't ever separate the two (the thoughts and
| behavior you have on them versus what you'd have without them.
| There is no second you to have a test, do a diff, and be able
| to tell exactly which behavior/thoughts come e.g. from an
| excess of those chemicals (e.g. due to exposure or diet or some
| condition in your body) and which from your regular brain
| without such influence.
|
| 2) "Nobody has ever experienced a crystal ball like this"
| Irellevant, as many do act at many points in life as such
| beliefs are 100% certainty (a plotting killer believing they
| will get away with it, for an extreme example). Doesn't matter
| whether they have a "crystal ball" guarantee of outcome X:
| their thinking making them see the future as having the same
| outcome X is enough.
|
| As for (3) I sorta agree.
|
| "MacAskill and others are concerned about what the discount
| rate should be because it is important for the decisions we
| make about the world--how much should we care about people who
| have not been born yet? One might be tempted to think that
| science could resolve this issue, but alas, it cannot."
|
| Of course it cannot. It's an ethical decision, which rests on
| personal ethics (not totally unlike personal taste), which are
| influenced by cultural (society's) ethics.
|
| If we want to think "rationally" about it, it would be based on
| "what kind of outcome we want for those future persons and how
| we can best achieve it". But even the choice of outcome would
| rest on ethics and cultural preferences - or something also
| non-rational like evolutionary urges.
| club_tropical wrote:
| 1) It sounds from what you write that you agree, even if
| reluctantly so, because "there is no diff". For completeness
| sake, I want to clarify that I believe in something far
| stronger than your reluctant resignation: that the whole
| conscious/subconscious separation, the body/head/hormone
| separation, that these are all artificial and wrong
| categorizations. There is one you, the whole you, no part
| meaningfully separable from the other, not "diff"able,
| because the hormones are not some external force acting on
| The Real You (TM) but a _physical manifestation_ of The One
| You (TM). If you manipulate body /head/hormones, you
| literally change The One You, to varying degrees depending on
| the intervention, obviously.
|
| 2) I disagree on 2 counts.
|
| a) _Thinking_ you 'll get away with something is
| categorically different from _knowing_ it. Nobody ever
| experiences this sort of assuredness and we cannot
| extrapolate our behavior under volatility to conditions of
| certainty. The closest we come to it are the most meaningless
| actions (like me reaching for a water bottle, "knowing" that
| I will touch it and lift it up), but no meaningfully large
| action, and _certainly_ not a single one that involves other
| conscious beings is _ever_ experienced as certain.
|
| b) Humans are not fundamentally probability-modeling animals.
| When your bottle slips and shatters on the hiking trail,
| nobody - not a single human soul - runs Monte Carlo
| simulations on where those shards might end up and what that
| might mean for the future of humanity and "solves back" the
| right action. It is a complete category error to model human
| actions as such. Probability estimates have their (limited)
| place in (rare) human decisions, but even then it is not an
| exact fit.
|
| This whole crystal-ball exercise is at best a _lazy_ attempt
| by Lee, because it is easy and convenient to talk about the
| robo-human caricatures of his imagination. He is basically
| shaking his fist ADMONISHING YOU to behave more like the
| simplified easily-quantified caricatures so he can study you
| easier get his MacArthur Genius Grant goddammit.
| pixl97 wrote:
| 2b)
|
| You drop a bottle on a biking trail. Do you clean it up?
|
| I mean, you likely won't get caught or in trouble if you
| don't, but you're apt to cause other humans harm by
| increasing the risk they'll get a flat tire.
|
| You drop a bottle off the edge of a cliff. Do you clean it
| up?
|
| Most people would not, the time and risk of getting to
| where the bottle is, is high versus the risk of someone
| being hurt by it.
|
| I believe you've discounted a huge amount of the
| probability and calculation our minds do in a subconscious
| manner. Try to catch a ball in zero gravity for a lesson in
| our built in assumptions.
| User23 wrote:
| Why does nearly everyone return shopping carts?
| pixl97 wrote:
| I see you subscribe to 4chan shopping cart theory
|
| ____
|
| The shopping cart is the ultimate litmus test for whether
| a person is capable of self-governing.
|
| To return the shopping cart is an easy, convenient task
| and one which we all recognize as the correct,
| appropriate thing to do. To return the shopping cart is
| objectively right. There are no situations other than
| dire emergencies in which a person is not able to return
| their cart. Simultaneously, it is not illegal to abandon
| your shopping cart. Therefore the shopping cart presents
| itself as the apex example of whether a person will do
| what is right without being forced to do it. No one will
| punish you for not returning the shopping cart, no one
| will fine you or kill you for not returning the shopping
| cart, you gain nothing by returning the shopping cart.
| You must return the shopping cart out of the goodness of
| your own heart. You must return the shopping cart because
| it is the right thing to do. Because it is correct.
|
| A person who is unable to do this is no better than an
| animal, an absolute savage who can only be made to do
| what is right by threatening them with a law and the
| force that stands behind it.
|
| The Shopping Cart is what determines whether a person is
| a good or bad member of society.
| coldtea wrote:
| > _a) Thinking you 'll get away with something is
| categorically different from knowing it. Nobody ever
| experiences this sort of assuredness_
|
| That's not really important at the personal behavior level
| (the thing we're discussing, and which the article
| addresses) though, but more of a pedantic dictinction,
| isn't it?
|
| We can't even be sure that we'll not die from a sudden
| heart attack in the next 10 minutes, but we nonetheless act
| and plan as if we have a 100% certainty that we wont, and
| we even feel that way (that is, we don't feel as this is an
| "open thing", we thing we'll live just fine - except those
| of us who have a related phobia and anxiety).
|
| > _When your bottle slips and shatters on the hiking trail,
| nobody - not a single human soul - runs Monte Carlo
| simulations on where those shards might end up and what
| that might mean for the future of humanity and "solves
| back" the right action._
|
| I'd say most humans will worry about somebody stepping on
| the glass on a public trail (or even less pressing
| concerns, like the impact of the litter on the environment,
| the possibility of the sun starting a fire through the
| shards, and so on) and will try to pick those shards. Heck,
| many will feel guilt if they don't.
|
| Whether they run Monte Carlo simulations or just use some
| conscious rational logic to deduce the possible issue, is
| not really important to the question, is it?
|
| So, the question would remain, why do we care for the
| possibility in the future of someone we don't even know
| stepping on the shards in 1 day or 1 year or 5 years, but
| not for other consequences of our actions far further in
| the future?
|
| I'd say the real answer is because they're too dispersed
| (based on many levels of n-th order effects and cascading
| consequences) and too remote (1-2 generations in the future
| is beyond a reasonable horizon for most people).
| User23 wrote:
| > There is one you, the whole you, no part meaningfully
| separable from the other, not "diff"able, because the
| hormones are not some external force acting on The Real You
| (TM) but a physical manifestation of The One You (TM). If
| you manipulate body/head/hormones, you literally change The
| One You, to varying degrees depending on the intervention,
| obviously.
|
| Incidentally this is exactly Catholic teaching on the human
| person.
|
| In fact I find it striking how in line with traditional
| Christian philosophy your judgments are. For example the
| need for a supernaturally provided moral code that's
| comprehensible to us follows from the reality that the
| human intellect truly is incapable of conceiving the
| possibility infinite higher order consequences of our
| actions. Thankfully we have some basic heuristics like
| don't kill people for no reason that help us out there.
|
| Edit: child has lost the plot. The point is the limitations
| of the intellect create a need for a moral science.
| avgcorrection wrote:
| > In fact I find it striking how in line with traditional
| Christian philosophy your judgments are.
|
| I find it not surprising that someone would latch onto a
| description of non-duality as something curiously "in
| line" with a particular religion.
| pessimizer wrote:
| I need to hear a restatement of 3) that doesn't rely on the
| word "equal" or "egalitarian" without defining them in the
| context of the argument you're making.
|
| What does it mean to say that everyone is or isn't "equal?" Are
| you trying to say that people are distinct (i.e. there is more
| than one person)? Are you trying to say that people aren't the
| same height, and there are others insisting that they are? What
| are you saying?
|
| The first two are very clear.
| antiterra wrote:
| Right, I can think my child is abstractly 'equal' to another
| person's child but also not feel as much ownership for their
| well being.
|
| I think what the commenter is saying is similar to a reductio
| ad absurdum of what it would be like if every child was of
| equal direct importance and priority to you. It, however,
| doesn't address what would happen if _everyone_ in a
| community voluntarily had this concern nominally and
| therefore could allocate responsibility across many.
| lo_zamoyski wrote:
| Putting the OP's comment aside, what is this abstract
| "equality"? We seem to be quite confident in announcing
| this proposition and affirming it in the public square, but
| how many people can actually tell you what this equality
| concerns? (Mind you, I am NOT claiming there is no sense in
| which human persons may be said to be equal. I am merely
| raising the issue that many people don't seem to know
| despite the confident assertions to the contrary and that
| lots of weird political hay has been made claiming some
| nebulous kind of "equality" that resists any kind of
| examination or analysis.)
| pessimizer wrote:
| > lots of weird political hay has been made claiming some
| nebulous kind of "equality" that resists any kind of
| examination or analysis.
|
| The resistance to analysis is often because they use it
| polymorphically. It will mean one thing in one sentence,
| a totally different thing in the next, and this will not
| be acknowledged in any way.
|
| I'm not an arguer about what words mean, for me it's
| enough that people tell me what they mean by the word so
| we can have an effective discussion. But the word has to
| mean _something_ and its definition cannot change within
| the same context.
| pessimizer wrote:
| I have no idea of what the commenter is actually trying to
| say, which is why I asked. I have to admit that usually
| when I hear people make statements like that, they're being
| deceptive in a couple of ways.
|
| Sometimes, when people claim a logical implication (if A
| then B), and people object to them by saying that A _doesn
| 't imply_ B, they will 1) follow with a claim that the
| objector is claiming that _nothing can imply anything else_
| , or 2) follow with a claim that "A doesn't imply B" is
| equivalent to saying "B doesn't exist."
|
| In these ways, a claim of "all birds fly" responds to a
| counter-claim of "not all birds fly" with: _" so you're
| saying that there are no birds that fly, then"_ or even
| worse _" so you're saying that nothing can fly, then."_
| I've even seen _" so you're saying that everything except
| birds can fly, then."_
|
| So I have no idea where it is going, but precision in the
| definitions of "equal" or "egalitarian" used in this
| context would help me to understand.
| User23 wrote:
| Surely you understand exactly what is meant. Why play dumb?
| For example I'm not equal to Bobby Fischer as a chess player.
| pessimizer wrote:
| I'm not playing dumb. And I'm also surprised that you're so
| confident that what they meant by equality is "equal skill
| levels at a particular task." If that's what they meant,
| there's literally nobody who believes either that everyone
| is equal at every task, or that everyone is equal at any
| task. That would be a dumb strawman.
|
| So are _you_ playing dumb, or is that really what you think
| they meant?
| vageli wrote:
| People can't even be considerate of others who exist, let alone
| those who are yet to be. Should a 15 year old bear the weight
| of their future offspring when deciding to sneak out of the
| house to drink with friends?
|
| It's impossible to know the totality of outcomes associated
| with an action and the author's examples are pretty simplistic.
| What if that glass you dropped and shattered becomes a tool of
| survival for a person lost in the woods?
| coldtea wrote:
| > _the author 's examples are pretty simplistic. What if that
| glass you dropped and shattered becomes a tool of survival
| for a person lost in the woods?_
|
| Well, speaking of simplistic, not to mention statistically
| implausible...
| pimlottc wrote:
| One, a 15 year old bear is a fully mature adult and can make
| its own decision. And two, I assume you meant den, because
| what bear lives in a house?
| avgcorrection wrote:
| My brain isn't into the future because of climate change, the
| threat of WWIII/nuclear war, The Economy, possible future
| pandemics like the one of 2020, and not being able to retire
| until I'm 70. But please do Gee Wiz me all you want about logical
| fallacies, nautil dot us.
| adhesive_wombat wrote:
| > not being able to retire until I'm 70
|
| I genuinely think that is optimistic. I'm not at all sure
| retirement will really be a thing in a couple of generations.
|
| Certainly the 20-40 year retirements that are dangled don't
| seem likely for many people.
| avgcorrection wrote:
| Well yes. Exactly.
| philip1209 wrote:
| This seems like the prospective corollary to the more
| retrospective "failed simulation effect":
|
| https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/rZXcwEgXWbHjLemAM/the-failed...
| Trasmatta wrote:
| > In fact, having depression is generally much worse than having
| diabetes
|
| As a T1 diabetic, the fun part is that diabetes is highly
| correlated with depression. So it's very common for depression to
| follow diabetes. Sucks to have to deal with both. It's a vicious
| cycle, because depression makes it harder to manage your
| diabetes, and poorly managed diabetes is correlated with more
| severe depression symptoms.
|
| Not exactly an "either or" problem. I'd rather just have
| depression, because at least there would be hope for treatment
| and remission. My diabetes will never be cured.
| throwaway_51122 wrote:
| As a fellow T1 diabetic, I fully agree. I'd _much_ rather have
| no diabetes and full-fat depression (assuming both conditions
| can be properly medicated) than the other way round - and I
| already have low-fat depression thanks to decades of untreated
| ADHD. A hypoglycemic "attack" can kill silently in the middle
| of the night. And trust me, I have way more frequent "suicidal"
| thoughts than hypos on an average day (quotes because I know
| I'm not going to follow through). Of course this isn't meant to
| be a pity party of who has it worse, this is more of a note to
| the author/readers.
|
| (Fortunately my ADHD diagnosis + medication seems to be helping
| a good bit.)
| telesilla wrote:
| From what I know about the brain, it is more of a prediction
| machine than anything else, based on prior input. It seems
| reasonable for the majority to be unconcerned with what cannot be
| reasonably predicted, and as the article states, for artists to
| imagine possible futures on our behalf.
| pixl97 wrote:
| I'd say two things. Filter and predict. Both of these things
| are done to conserve energy and survive.
| hypertele-Xii wrote:
| Artists aren't limited to possible futures though, I'd
| encourage more of them to imagine the _impossible,_ as well.
| coldtea wrote:
| The impossible as opposed to the merely not plausible, isn't
| really alluring for art, as it's neither a depiction of
| what's there (art as mirror), nor a warning (artist as
| Cassandra or sensitive guard), and not even a call to arms
| (art as politics, utopia).
|
| In other words, it doesn't relate to the artist and us. It
| only relates when there's a thread that connects what's
| imagined to where we are, where we might be, or where we want
| to go.
| lostmsu wrote:
| Obviously false statement, given the genre of fiction.
|
| Also, objective impossible is wildly different from any
| individual subjective one.
| coldtea wrote:
| > _Obviously false statement, given the genre of
| fiction._
|
| Obviously we are aware of the genre of fiction. Or
| science fiction for that matter. Or superhero comics, or
| supernatural stories, and so on. So my point wasn't that
| e.g. vampire fiction doesn't exist or isn't interesting
| to writers and reader.
|
| But nothing in the genre of fiction is really about the
| impossible. That is just metaphor and plot device for
| what was, is, or can be.
|
| If there's a superhero with laser eyes and super-
| strength, it's not about the superhero, but about the
| idea of heroism, the responsibility of power, the
| connections with people, the repercusions of actions, and
| so on. It's the connection with the existing and the
| possible that makes it interesting.
|
| The non-realistic part is just background.
| lostmsu wrote:
| Art is background. Without background Romeo and Juliet is
| just "love could be a strong feeling", and Back to the
| Future is "time travel has an unsolved grandfather
| paradox".
| temptemptemp111 wrote:
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