muflax' mindstream

Why You Don't Want Vipassana

Wed, 13 Mar 2013 00:00:00 +0100

This is based on a series of PMs I exchanged with someone on LW asking me why I thought vipassana isn’t what most people are looking for and might be actively dangerous. I cleaned it up a bit and reposted it here.

Where specifically does it talk about vipassana being set up to break people down? That sounds fairly interesting. Also, I’m usually disappointed by the clarity of presentation in most meditation books. It seems that if you ask questions that are too hard they just say “the map is not the territory” or some koan and expect that to suffice. I prefer a sort of LW-type detailed analysis that taboos words and tries to be precise and clear. Are there any works that you know of that are like that?

Daniel Ingram calls that the “mushroom culture” - keep ‘em in the dark and feed them shit.

Buddhists have a pretty bad track record of being open and honest about their own practice. I think there are basically three reasons:

Hardcore practice doesn’t sell. Most people seeking meditation, at least in Western contexts, want easy psychotherapy, not enlightenment. If you go all out, you lose most of your paying customers. Teachers in Asian countries tend to be much more hardcore (or so I heard, I’ve never actually used a teacher, only read their stuff).
Real Buddhism isn’t “nice”. Even if you try to take meditation seriously, as Goenka’s organization does (their courses are all pretty good and free), you can’t actually do what Buddhists have been doing for centuries. For example, try this and see how many students are willing to listen:

Furthermore, as if the monk were to see a corpse cast away in a charnel ground - one day, two days, three days dead - bloated, livid and festering, he applies it to this very body, ‘This body, too: Such is its nature, such is its future, such its unavoidable fate’…

Or again, as if he were to see a corpse cast away in a charnel ground, picked at by crows, vultures and hawks, by dogs, hyenas and various other creatures… a skeleton smeared with flesh and blood, connected with tendons… (…) decomposed into a powder: He applies it to this very body, ‘This body, too: Such is its nature, such is its future, such its unavoidable fate.’

(…) His mindfulness is established, and he lives detached, and clings to nothing in the world.

Yet corpse meditation (i.e. thinking of one’s own body as a rotting corpse, ideally using a fresh corpse for comparison) is an absolute core practice in Buddhism. The Satipatthana Sutta and Visuddhimagga, two foundational texts, spend whole chapters discussing them and similar practices. There are Buddhist traditions that don’t have so negative values and would be much nicer, but for historical reasons, they never became very influential outside Tibet. David Chapman talks a lot about this.
Most teachers have no idea what they’re talking about. Initially, Western teachers (in the 60s-70s) didn’t talk about enlightenment because they didn’t want to scare away their audience. But if they don’t talk, then idiots are indistinguishable from real teachers, and if the audience only wants useless psychotherapy anyway, well, then you get the current situation. (Zen is also partially responsible here. They have a very pragmatic attitude of “don’t care about the map or territory, just practice”, which means Zen practice has much less bullshit in it, but it’s also unnecessarily hard to understand and no one can effectively contradict you if you’re doing it wrong.)

Anyway, back to vipassana. Bear in mind that the core technique (pay attention to every sensation and detach from it) is deceptively simple and can be taught even without knowing what it’s for, so it ends up a lot in new age and mindfulness bullshit.

But it’s real purpose is the destruction of the self and all desires - and it’s pretty good at that (if you keep it up; otherwise you get stuck in mental hell). But that’s not what most people want. They like their identity and goals in life, so it fucks them up. This purpose is clear from the history of vipassana. Basically, it was (re-?)invented in the 20th century, based on old texts like the Visuddhimagga (good book btw, very detailed and explicit, but pretty dense and could use an extensive commentary). These texts are very explicit about their goals: life is bad, desires and the self lead to reincarnation and more life, so we must get rid of all attachment to anything in life. All techniques are designed only for this purpose. (For a more detailed history, again Chapman and the books he mentions.)

Vipassana is a modern reconstruction of these techniques (a pretty close one, I think, having both done vipassana and read the Visuddhimagga), so it’s no surprise that it causes breakdowns and all kinds of issues.

For example, the Visuddhimagga has a chapter “The Benefits of Developing Understanding” that outlines the whole point of Theravada meditation (of which vipassana is the most famous form):

Briefly, though, its benefits should be understood as these: (A) removal of the various defilements, (B) experience of the taste of the noble fruit (i.e. “the fruits of asceticism”), (C) ability to attain the attainment of cessation (i.e. nirvana), and (D) achievement of worthiness to receive gifts and so on.

What are these defilements?

Herein, it should be understood that one of the benefits of the […] is the removal of the various defilements beginning with [mistaken] view of individuality. This starts with the delimitation of mentality-materiality [i.e. dualism]. Then one of the benefits […] is the removal […] of the various defilements beginning with the fetters.

The fetters are:

belief in a self
doubt or uncertainty, especially about the teachings
attachment to rites and rituals
sensual desire
ill will
lust for material existence, lust for material rebirth
lust for immaterial existence, lust for rebirth in a formless realm
conceit
restlessness
ignorance

It then gives this nice poem:

With dreadful thump the thunderbolt
Annihilates the rock.
The fire whipped by the driving wind
Annihilates the wood.
The radiant orb of solar flame
Annihilates the dark.
Developed understanding, too,
Annihilates inveterate
Defilements’ netted overgrowth,
The source of every woe.
This blessing in this very life
A man himself may know.

It also gives this explanation:

What is the difference between one who has attained [cessation] and one who is dead?

This is also given in a sutta, according as it is said: ‘When a monk is dead, friend, has completed his term, his bodily formations [i.e. perception of the body] have ceased and are quite still, his verbal formations have ceased and are quite still, his mental formations have ceased and are quite still, his life is exhausted, his heat has subsided, and his faculties [i.e. seeing, hearing, …] are broken up. When a monk has entered upon the cessation of perception and feeling, his bodily formations have ceased and are quite still, his verbal formations have ceased and are quite still, his mental formations have ceased and are quite still, his life is unexhausted, his heat has not subsided, his faculties are quite whole’.

So the only difference between an ideal monk and a corpse is that the monk still has a beating heart. :) Given these goals, it’s no surprise that someone doing a lot of vipassana doesn’t get much done. That’s the whole point!

So much for the background. For the actual technique, I’ll recommend Ingram’s MCTB. No bullshit, direct and honest, doesn’t hide any information. It’s popular among LW meditators and rightfully so, I think. It does tend to get a bit fuzzy sometimes, but that’s really hard to avoid when you’re dealing with unusual states of consciousness. There isn’t much of a reference frame you can use, and so far introspection is the only tool we have, so it’s bound to suck occasionally.

Also, Ingram has a whole chapter about different definitions of enlightenment and his thoughts on how they came about. His pet theory is fairly plausible and clearly defined (even has testable criteria!), so it’s worth a read as well.

Having said all that, vipassana isn’t all of meditation or Buddhism, and particularly Tibetan Buddhism has a lot of nice stuff that is quite the opposite of renunciation, but they have major problems with their epistemology. It’s all full of demons and shit, and you never know when it’s just a useful visualization and when they’re quite serious about talking to a god.

Also, what is it exactly that you (and Ingram) are trying to get out of meditation?

Good question. Ingram thinks of insight meditation (i.e. vipassana etc.) as a kind of ratchet. There are certain stages where once you reach them, you can’t go “back” to a normal life. You are either stuck in an emotionally unstable state or you have to get it over with completely. There’s some truth to that and most hardcore practitioners I know unintentionally crossed this first threshold (often through drugs or lucid dreaming) and then found that only careful meditation made it any better.

I don’t think meditation (and vipassana in particular) is really the best option here, and I suspect that a lot of the problems are one of your own making by using techniques designed for renunciation. So I’m not doing any vipassana anymore.

Basically I tend to think of it this way: there are unmet desires and they will cause a lot of suffering. One way to solve this problem is to remove the desires, but that’s like fighting spam by shutting down the internet. A better approach is to transform these desires in a way that doesn’t cause you any problems. I can’t recommend any good introductions to that because I would have to provide elaborate clarifications, but if you’re into Buddhism anyway, check out the tantra people. At least they have interesting breakdowns.

Regardless, vipassana isn’t the only form of meditation. Another common form is concentration meditation (or samadhi / samatha), also called kasina meditation, after the typical concentration object. Basically, you pick a simple object (a colored disc, a mantra, the breath, a god, …) and pay attention to it. That’s… pretty much it. (The Attention Revolution by B. Alan Wallace is a good detailed explanation, but he’s a dualist crank and you know, “sit and watch this disc for as long as you can” isn’t really hard to explain.)

The interesting thing is that with enough practice, certain states of concentration arise. MCTB also talks about them, so I won’t repeat myself, but they are quite fun and relaxing. My main criticism of concentration practice really is just how friggin’ hard it is. It takes ages to make progress and quite honestly, I don’t have the patience for that. It’s really blissful, but I got bored of bliss after a while. I like reading more, but it’s a matter of taste, I guess.

Also, these hardcore states of concentration don’t seem to transfer to anything else. Someone who can hold an hour of unwavering concentration on their breath (an impressive feat that probably takes hundreds of hours to achieve) isn’t any better at math, programming, video games or whatever task that requires concentration you can think of. The only way to get better at X is to practice X. There isn’t any universal concentration practice.

Another technique is typically called metta meditation. Basically, you pick an emotion you would like to cultivate (normally kindness) and expand it. To do so, you think of something particularly joyful (like a cute puppy or someone you love) and concentrate on the feeling. You then try to localize it somewhere in your body (try the heart) and see if you can expand it a bit. You grow the sensation till your whole body, then the room, then all space is filled with kindness. Then you pick a less kind thought (say a neutral acquaintance) and expand the kindness to them. Then to stuff you hate and so on.

So basically, you grasp onto a strong sensation of whatever emotion you want and begin to associate it with as many things as you can, overriding other emotional responses if necessary. This works pretty well (and is not unique to Buddhism in any way). Jack Kornfield and Pema Chödrön have a lot of good material about it. Personally, I’m quite fond of my emotional landscape nowadays (there are people I want to hate) and I have no use for metta practice myself. But it’s exactly what it says on the tin and gets fast results, so if you’re looking for it, check them out.

I find your views on metta to be humorous, though why would you want to hate somebody?

Because they are bad people? Without getting into any moral or political reasons, I’m not CooperateBot. There are people I defect against in the Prisoner’s Dilemma, and hate is an appropriate emotional response (among others) in these cases, I think. It’s important not to surrender yourself because of a misguided dislike for discomfort.

What have you learned about tantra? I usually associate that with tantric sex. I haven’t heard tantra outside of that context.

Yeah, it doesn’t get much attention, unfortunately. David Chapman is currently working on a good presentation. Eating the Shadow is what characterizes tantra for me. Instead of trying to detach or remove “bad” aspects of yourself, you accept them as your own and integrate them. That’s inherently a very messy and personal process, so it doesn’t seem to lend itself to such nice models as in vipassana.

It’s also a very “narrative” approach, if you want, so the process of doing it tends to create all kinds of useful-but-blatantly-false explanations. I would like to be able to just say, “shut up and do what they say, and don’t pay attention to what that literally means”, but that’s obviously very dangerous advice. I wish there was a group of people I could point to and say, “follow them, they are competent and sane”, but alas.

If you dance with demons, don’t be surprised if they eat your brain.

Reading Latin (Part 2)

Tue, 18 Sep 2012 00:00:00 +0200

This is the second post in a 2-part series about learning to read Latin, or any language, really. See Part One, Methods and Mindset first. This is Part Two, Tools and Examples.

Vorwärts immer, rückwärts nimmer! (Always forwards, never backwards!)

– Erich H. on mechanism design

So you want to read Latin. If only you had a system! Well then, let’s design one! There are only two rules to follow.

First, we need to guarantee victory. That’s actually a really simple requirement. We just have to make sure that the rate at which you learn new stuff is always greater than the rate at which you forget old stuff. If that is not the case, then you’re the poor shmuck who thinks they can save the Titanic with a bucket if they’re only fast enough.

But if your skill always increases, even if just a little bit, then as long as you keep going, you will win. There are no dead-ends for monotonic functions, my friend.

“But”, I hear you lament, “maybe it gets really hard at some point! I’m a really lazy person and I hate to put in any effort whatsoever!” My, how honest of you! But don’t worry - me too. Keep the effort for the workaholic law school students, we’ll be eating pizza and reading Roman poetry instead.

This brings us the other requirement: every single step along the way must be doable. It must always be easy. Always. No “three easy payments and one fucking complicated payment”.

And that is all. If every step is doable, and every step moves you forward, you will win. Taste that sweet inevitability! It’s the taste of victory.

So how do we actually implement these two rules? The first is easy. We just use spaced repetition.¹ Done. Isn’t it nice to deal with solved problems? So now we have a ratchet, a system that cannot turn backwards. The only remaining step is making sure we can always turn it forward.

Here we use what Krashen calls “i+1”, which just means we treat the language as huge list of small items that need be learned (or bugs to be fixed). There may be 10,000 of them, but that doesn’t matter. We have a ratchet. Bring it on!

But remember what we’re here for - reading Latin. Not doing senseless exercises all day. Not meeting a bunch crazy people talking about where stuff is or learning about how the Romans hated money. Not to brag how large our vocabulary is, or how we know what an ablative is, or how intelligent it would makes us look when we tell our friends we’re fluent in Latin.² No, we want to actually read texts. And if a text doesn’t at least have some pirates or sexual innuendos in it, we’re not interested. That’s the whole point of this effort after all. People forget that sometimes.

So we just do the straightforward thing - we read texts. And if you’re as lazy as I am (and this is the internet, so I know you are), you don’t want to do Anki sessions at one time, and reading sessions at another time. You can barely do one thing, you’d never do two things, let alone keep them synchronized. So just move the text into Anki. Meet the sentence card:

Read the sentence, try to understand it, compare with the translation³ on the answer side. That’s too hard, even with the bit of context before and after? I hear ya. That’s why we put a hint on difficult cards. It contains the full translation of the sentence, like this:

“Wait a minute”, I hear you think, “if the translation is already on the question side, isn’t that too easy?”, to which I reply, of course it is! That’s the point!

You couldn’t actually read the whole sentence without any help right now. But you still want to expose yourself to the real language, and learn what the sentence means. You’d still like to know what these Romans had to say about dealing with uppity Germans. But due to i+1, everything on the question side should always be known except for one thing, which is the new piece of information to be learned. So we have to use extensive hints, and in this case, a full translation. Later on you’ll rely less on hints, of course.

But wait, there’s more! Look at all those words in this sentence. You probably don’t know those words. So let’s make word cards:

And put the dictionary definition on the answer side:

(And yes, that’s a different sentence. Consistency, who needs it, amirite?)

With the help of the sentence translation, general context and the full dictionary entry, we can figure out what the word means, most of the time. If not, we just delete the card and move on. Eh, it’s a target-rich environment and there are thousands of unknown words. Volume matters, individual cards don’t. The same goes for thoroughness: just pick some new things. (And old words you still don’t quite know count as new.) Don’t force yourself to learn every single unknown word of every sentence. Just keep incrementing this i. (And please, for the love of all that is awesome, delete boring cards instantly.)

Once you’re more familiar with a word, we move in the opposite direction, and do production cards:

And for variation, we can also use production cards that give the base form of a word and need to be inflected:

These three card types are our bread and butter.⁴ (Well, nuts and butter, if you’re paleo.) Pick a text you’d actually like to read, not some artificial textbook crap, turn it into sentence cards, add word cards after each sentence so you can do your vocab during your reading, and do your reps every day. That’s it. Come back to me after you’ve done a few thousand of those cards and are still allegedly unable to read Latin. I’ll compensate you with free pictures of at least 3 kittens, I promise.

So now that we know the design of our system and all its components, how do we actually make the cards?

We enter them by hand, every single one of them.

Bwahaha, of course not. What, do we look like we have too much free time? We’re busy with this Catullus dude!

The easiest way to get started is probably to use something LingQ-like. You put in the text, it highlights your unknown words, and you can select which ones you’d like to see on cards later. It’s not quite fully integrated and effortless, but it’s pretty good. So check out LingQ, or one of its two free clones.

Or you’re a hacker and write your own, fully automated tool that generates all cards in advance, because hey, predicting what words you’ll like and in what order you should introduce them isn’t very hard, so maybe our electronic slaves can do it for us.⁵ And then you just throw in a text, wait a few seconds for all your cards to come out, and you’ll do reps for a few months, undisturbed, until it’s time for a new text.

Now go set up your ratchet and feed it words. It’s so easy, children can do it without a system, so why aren’t you kicking their collective asses already?

I recommend Anki (and AnkiDroid). But it’s not too important what kind of SRS you use, as long as you’re comfortable with the tool. Heck, write your own, the core algorithm is literally just a few lines of code. The rest is just fancy interfaces and stuff. I also recommend you use Beeminder to further strengthen your ratchet.↩
If flaunting your Latin skills does get you laid and no one told me, I’ll be so pissed.↩
Where do you get the translation? You could use a proper translation, maybe through a bilingual reader, line up the sentences and all that crap, but we’re lazy. So we’ll just use Google Translate. Yes, really.

Let me generalize this point: if you have the choice between a good but labor-intensive option, and a half-assed but cheap option, you go with the cheap one. Your most important resource is fun. If you run out of fun, it’s over. Deleting 30% of your sentences because the automatic translation sucks and you don’t understand what’s going on? You’ll still do 70%, you’ll still read most of the text, you’ll still be fluent in time. Run out of fun? Game over.

By the time you have manually entered or corrected even one chapter, I’ll have done hundreds if not thousands of reviews, despite having to delete 10-20% of new cards. If you still think manual design is worth your time, I’m not impressed by your priorities.↩
There are a few more card types I find useful, though not always for Latin. There’s the reading card, for words with unknown pronunciation:

In case you have access to movies or TV shows, you can use subs2srs to generate fantastic raw material for listening cards:

In this case, I recommend you escalate how much you show. For completely new stuff, play the sound, put on the transcript and the translation. Then as words become more familiar, leave out the translation, and when all words are known, play only the sound.

And finally, once you have sentences where you already know everything, you can turn them into complete production cards. You only show the sentence / play the sound, and then you look away and repeat the sentence from memory. This forces you to create a mental model of the sentence, and is a great way to effortlessly activate your passive skills. It just looks like this:

Generally speaking, you cannot say what you do not understand, so production should always follow comprehension. If you’re at all unsure if what you’re saying is right, you probably shouldn’t be speaking, even if you’re just repeating.↩
Is my card tool user-friendly, well-documented and thoroughly tested? Bwahaha, hells no. Does it work? Sure, most of the time. I’ve done over a thousand cards with it already, and I’m very happy with the results. But it’s very much a “works for me” kind of tool. If you’re a hacker, you can probably get it running on any kind of *nix system with fairly minimal effort, but I don’t have the time to make it actually user-friendly.

And if you complain how automatic cards are bullshit, you need to use The One True Method Of Efficient Teaching or how back in your days, You Made Cards By Hand Uphill Both Ways And You Liked It, you can suck my 7k+ deck.↩

Reading Latin (Part 1)

Wed, 04 Jul 2012 00:00:00 +0200

This is the first post in a 2-part series about learning to read Latin, or any language, really. Even though the Four Evangelists - Khatzu of the Moto clan, Steve “Doing What I Do, Better, Earlier and Getting Paid For It” Kaufmann, Prof. Alexander “The Shadow” Arguelles and Stephen “The” Krashen - have already brought us the Holy Scripture of Language Learning, my approach is slightly different, more hacker-friendly, and a bit more text-focused. Saint Morph Man covers TV, I cover books.

This is Part One, Method and Mindset. Part Two is about Tools and Examples.

So you want to learn how to read Latin. Sure, no probs. Let me channel the Warrior of Ten Thousand Sentences for a second…

Here’s the deal: you can already read Latin.

That’s right, I’m claiming you already have the ability to read Latin. That software is already installed, my friend.

You can read, presumably. (P-zombies who only pretend to read, go away!) The mechanism to read stuff is there. You aren’t a chimpanzee who’s totally puzzled by this “reading” thing everyone seems to be doing. (If you are, please don’t conquer our planet and enslave all of humanity?)

“But”, you might say, “I can read English, not Latin”. That, my friend, is not entirely correct. Look here:

Gallia est omnis divisa in partes tres.

That’s a sentence with seven words, right? You see that? So your Latin module is working just fine.

“But I don’t know what ‘omnis’ means!” Oh, so you’re saying your software has some bugs. Seems someone shipped an early beta. It happens. Your database is missing a word. ‘omnis’ means ‘all of’.

“But I don’t know what ‘Gallia’ means, either!” Another bug. That’s ‘Gaul’, the place where Asterix lives.

I’m not gonna lie to you. There may be a few more bugs in your software. The developer has a history of being kinda sloppy.

But that’s no big deal because you can patch everything. You just have to run your software, feed it some input, and see if you get any breakage. “I don’t understand that!”, that’s what a bug feels like. Then you just install the relevant patch, fill that gap in your knowledge, and that’s it.

Nothing more to it than that. You still remember what ‘omnis’ means? It never gets harder than that.

Learning one word is a trivially easy task. You’ve just done it twice, with no effort. (I presume. If you’re totally exhausted at this point, my apologies! Also, suck it.)

So you’re telling me, “I want to know what that sentence means!”. Sure thing. Seven words, remember? So we do it 5 more times. Heck, I’m sure you can already guess some of them.

Like ‘in’. You totally know what ‘in’ means, dude. And ‘partes’. Yeah, ‘parts’. That’s really tricky. ‘est’ is just ‘is’, like in French. ‘tres’, think un, dos, tres - right, it’s ‘three’. One last word, ‘divisa’, which obviously is ‘divided’.

So that sentence means ‘All of Gaul is divided into three parts’.

Yeah, the word order is a bit weird, I know. If it confuses you, that’s another bug. The sentence sub-module can be a bit tricky. It’s an ancient hack, ok? Serious legacy code. But it’s pretty small, so it’s easy to fix the occasional bugs.

“But muflax”, you ask, “how did you know what ‘omnis’ meant?”. Good question, you handsome narrative device, you!

I looked it up. Not everyone knows this, but people aren’t actually born speaking a language. There are no “native” languages at all. (I was shocked too!) These damned kids who later go around claiming Latin, or Japanese, or whatever new-fangled thing they speak these days, they claim this thing is their “native” language, they totally own it, and they learned it in completely unique and special ways, ones only children can use…

These people are full of shit.

When those kids didn’t know what something meant, they looked it up, too. Not in paper dictionaries, generally (lol paper books, amirite?), but TV shows, or other people, or comic books, or… Well, you get the idea. Quite a distributed way to store a language, if you ask me.

You may have noticed that there aren’t many Romans around these days. There’s a bunch of cosplayers in Italy, but they’re kinda weird. So where did I look it up?

There are a bunch of sources, but the three main sources are, dictionaries, parallel texts and context.

As a dictionary, Whitaker’s Words is pretty good. (Also has an online version. The program is written in Ada, which, as you may know, is the second-oldest language known to man, invented by Gilgamesh himself, right after he killed the Great Bull of Heaven.) You can google for more. Almost all languages have good online dictionaries these days.

Parallel texts just means “look this shit up in a translation”. The original sentence is the beginning of Caeser’s ~~blog posts~~ account of the Gallic war, so that’s pretty popular and there are translations galore.

And context, well, did you really need me to tell you that ‘in’ means ‘in’ or ‘into’? You just got that? Could make an informed guess? Perfect.

No other magic involved.¹ I don’t secretly have Caesar chained up in my basement, that’s a dirty lie, I’ve given up on necromancy centuries ago!

You have your pre-installed Latin module. You feed it content. You encounter some bugs, you look them up in the most convenient way possible. You feed it more content until all the bugs are fixed.

Back in the Stone Age, which is pretty much any time before the 90s as far as I’m concerned, you’d take a text you wanted to read, get a translation (written by an old dude who censored all the dick jokes, likely), put them up next to each other, and read. You’d pay attention to how the sentence structure works, how words match up, what patterns there are. If something looked interesting, you’d write it down in your notebook. Also, all the words you didn’t know and couldn’t trivially guess. Then every day, you’d review those words. If you were particularly fancy, you’d even make paper cards out of them. Do that for a while, bam, write ~~Aristotle fan-fiction~~ scholastic philosophy in Church Latin.

Maybe we can automate this process, have (begin ominous music) The Computer (end ominous music) systematically look for bugs and generate little patches for us. You know, so we can be as lazy as is humanly possible. Which is very lazy indeed.

There’s one more thing though. I’m sorry to say, but, well, how can I put this nicely… you have brain-rot. What I mean is, someone accidentally turned on the Second Law of Thermodynamics in this universe, and now we’re all doomed to the endless samsara of memory loss.

You’ll forget things again. You may have noticed this feature of reality before. (Unless you forgot. Haha.) So you may want to use some little trick to not forget things. Not strictly necessary, of course, but personally, I’m fan of only learning something once. Don’t like wasting time much.

So you put your stuff in your trusty SRS, use a bunch of Anki cards for your new-learned words - I’ll tell you how in part 2 - and that’s it.

You now know everything there is to reading Latin.

Here’s Lucius Vorenus opinion on grammar: “Grammar… I am a son of immersion! I fuck grammar in its arse!”↩

Why The Gods Are Trolling You

Thu, 14 Jun 2012 00:00:00 +0200

(I actually intended to make this argument after I had presented a certain construction of (meta-)meta-ethics, and after I had more strongly motivated the locality axiom, but Things Changed¹. You may have to fill in the gaps yourself for now.)

Let’s start with a simple definition - what’s trolling? Trolling, like crackpottery, is arguing for positions that are not merely motivated by truth-seeking². The major difference, however, is that a crackpot actually believes what they are saying, they just use an interestingness prior to select their beliefs. A troll is intentionally adjusting their beliefs for the specific argument, either in content (“lol bible says kill the gays”) or strength (“I feel very strongly about this definition!”).

Of course, all the good philosophers³, mystics⁴ and hackers⁵ have, at some point at least, been engaged in trolling, but What Would Jesus Do isn’t enough of an argument for us.

So let’s do this from first principles.

The simplest is this:

Moral action must always be possible.

There cannot be a situation in which every possible action an agent can take is wrong. The set of available moral actions is never empty.

This should be self-evident, just like the axiom of identity. Similar requirements exist elsewhere. For example, we have this axiom when it comes to rational beliefs:

Rational beliefs must always make a difference in anticipation.

Beliefs are about predictions and anticipation, but if someone who holds an irrational belief makes exactly the same predictions in all circumstances as someone who holds the rational belief, then, well, you’re doing it wrong.

Either the irrationalist is actually right and just uses a different language, or the rationalist is wrong and likely arguing about a meaningless question.

Similarly, morality is about actions. In rationality, you are presented with a set of possible beliefs and choose certain ones. In morality, you choose actions⁶ in the same way.

So just as rationality requires that there is always a difference in anticipation and that the set of anticipated events is never empty, so morality requires a difference in action and that the set of available moral actions is never empty.

This does not, of course, require that those actions be easy, pleasant, certain or otherwise nice. Sophie’s Choice is still allowed, but not Calvinism.

This is already enough for us, it turns out. One meta-level down, we can now formulate the locality axiom:

Only local information can be relevant for moral action.

If this were not the case, and moral decisions depended on global information, like say the entire history of the Andromeda Galaxy, then anyone who doesn’t have this information - especially any computationally or physically limited agent like us - could not, in principle, do the right thing.

Thus, morality is always local.⁷

But what does this imply?

Remember the Cartesian Demon, a being which is vastly more powerful than you and misleads you about the content of reality. Figuring out whether such a being exists or not is not possible with your computational resources. Thus, its existence is global information, not local - it cannot be morally relevant!

Dealing with an angel or a demon can’t make a moral difference for you because you couldn’t (in the general case) tell them apart in the first place. Whether you are being trolled or not is therefore morally irrelevant.

So it’s clear that being trolled is morally neutral, but what about actively trolling someone?

Well, that depends on your intentions⁸!

For one thing, it is not possible for your actions to ever screw over another agent in the moral sense. (It might still suck to be them, though.) However, you also can’t be responsible for consequences you couldn’t locally have predicted, or else you might unknowingly bring damnation upon a Cartesian Stalker that chose to kill itself should you ever eat chocolate ice cream, a clear violation of locality.

So because others don’t have an obligation to hear any particular version of the truth, you can’t, in general, have an obligation to speak it either.

This doesn’t get you out of jail for free, but it does, quite explicitly, allow trolling for the good⁹ of the one being trolled.

Which is why the gods are trolling you.

Particularly, I saw Grognor’s tweet:

Rationalize that trolling is morally neutral and can be done responsibly so you can keep doing it without feeling guilty #lifehacks #muflhax

And I’m appalled by that suggestion! I’m not rationalizing! I have a complex meta-ethical set of axioms that has morally-neutral trolling as a derivable theorem!

I didn’t start out with the conclusion here, I did proper meta-ethics and discovered it! I’m not that crazy.↩
Or rather, “believing without preferences”, merely following the axioms of probability theory without any utility function. Not even Roombas do that.↩
Schopenhauer even wrote a book about it.↩
The Lord has said: “These people praise me with their words, but they never really think about me. They worship me by repeating rules made up by humans. So once again I will do things that shock and amaze them, and I will destroy the wisdom of those who claim to know and understand.” (Isaiah 29)↩
I don’t think I need to cite examples.↩
Note, of course, that deliberately believing something is an action. Beliefs are not exempt from optimization. Don’t be a rock.↩
See Non-Local Metaethics why this immediately rules out many meta-ethical theories like Average Utilitarianism.↩
I’d like to point out that locality automatically introduces the Doctrine of Double Effect.↩
Act only for the good. Leave the “greater” to God.↩

Against Pessimism

Mon, 11 Jun 2012 00:00:00 +0200

You know that feel when you want to argue a point, but every time you try to write it down, it descends into outright trolling¹ or getting angry at people being wrong on the internet?

Yeah.

So I made videos with talking animals instead. This is all.

(Here are the scripts, in case you prefer text. But the voices are crucial to the soundness of the arguments.)

Elephant: I’m a grumpy antinatalist. I don’t think people should have children and I like to make everyone miserable.
Zebra: What is your argument?
Elephant: The asymmetry between benefit and harm. We have no duty to make someone happy, but a duty to avoid harm. If we don’t have children, we don’t deprive them of anything, but avoid their inevitable harm.
Zebra: But isn’t it consistent with the asymmetry to believe that we’d be better off not existing, yet that life is still awesome? If we have a duty to avoid harm, doesn’t that also extend to beliefs that make people feel miserable? Don’t you have an overly individualistic perspective that ignores net benefits to others and consequences of beliefs?
Elephant: No. I will now write a blog about how being happy is morally wrong and irrational.

Elephant: I would rather know the truth and be miserable than believe a lie and be happy.
Zebra: What does it mean to care about the truth?
Elephant: If X is true, I desire to believe that X is true. If X is false, I desire to believe that X is false. Let me not become attached to beliefs I may not want.
Zebra: Aren’t you also a utilitarian?
Elephant: Yes. It is best to do what brings the greatest good for the greatest number.
Zebra: Shouldn’t you then believe what maximizes utility? If believing that X is true maximizes utility, I desire to believe that X is true.
Elephant: No. It is proper for me to make deontological arguments whenever I feel like it, and still call deontology a rationalization of cognitive biases.
Zebra: Can’t you self-modify to believe the truth and still feel happy? A lack of skill is not a virtue. You are just bad at feelings.
Elephant: No. My emotions are untouchable except when it involves feeling superior to others.

Elephant: Let me tell you about how life is meaningless. There is no objective purpose in life. People just make up stories and ignore evidence that contradicts them.
Zebra: But all stories are made up. This does not make them less meaningful.
Elephant: Yes it does. Objective things do not need to be created.
Zebra: Ice cream is also created.
Elephant: Ice cream is not objective. Ice cream is meaningless.
Zebra: Why do people need meaning?
Elephant: Because it makes them happy. Without stories, life is unbearable.
Zebra: Then why do you tell me that life is meaningless? Don’t you want people to be happy?
Elephant: No. It is necessary for my complaining to feel meaningful that I ignore that it contradicts itself.

I troll because I care. <3↩