Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The Whispering Earring

croissanthology.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

11–20 of 99 posts

Re: The Whispering Earring

#11

Post by ryandv »

abeppu wrote: post #10
ryandv wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The moral of the story is that neocortical facilities (vaguely corresponding to what distinguishes modern humans) depend on free will. If you want to merely enthral yourself to voices of the gods a la Julian Jaynes' bicameral man, you can, but this is a regression to a prior stage of humanity's development - away from egoic, free willed man, and backwards to more of a reactive automaton, merely a servant of (possibly…

I think there's a meaningful difference between a tool to remind oneself to take a beat before speaking vs being told what to say. For example, cues that help you avoid an impulsive reaction of anger I think is a step away from being a reactive automaton.

Anger is just another aspect of the human condition, and is absolutely justified in cases of grave injustice (case in point: Nazis, racism). It's not for some earring to decide when it is justly applied and when it is not; that is the prerogative of humanity.

In either case none of this cueing or prompting needs to be exogenous or originate from some external technology. The Eastern mystics have developed totally endogenous psychotechnologies that serve this same purpose, without the need to atrophy your psyche.

Re: The Whispering Earring

#12

Post by AndrewDucker »

CoopaTroopa wrote: post #4

"The parable of the earring was not about the dangers of using technology that wasn't Truly Part Of You, which would indeed have been the kind of dystopianism I dislike. It was about the dangers of becoming too powerful yourself." https://web.archive.org/web/20121007235422/http://squid314.l...

As I said in a comment on that post, 13 years ago: "any parable that's about being too powerful is almost necessarily also about technology, because it's technology that allows the average person to get that power"

Re: The Whispering Earring

#14

Post by rwnspace »

JohnKemeny wrote: post #13

[flagged]

He has some great essays and research pieces and has fostered a generally nice community of people who grew out of LessWrong. There aren't many places online to talk about those things in a certain way without it devolving rapidly.

Re: The Whispering Earring

#15

Post by tacitusarc »

I think this ignores the internal conflict in most people’s psyche. The simplest form of this is long term vs short term thinking, but certainly our desires pull us in competing, sometimes opposite, directions.

Am I the me who loves cake or the me who wants to be in shape? Am I the me who wants to watch movies or who wants to write a book?

These are not simply different peaks of a given utility function, they are different utility functions entirely.

Soon after being put on, the whispering earring would go insane.

Re: The Whispering Earring

#17

Post by patcon »

abeppu wrote: post #10
ryandv wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The moral of the story is that neocortical facilities (vaguely corresponding to what distinguishes modern humans) depend on free will. If you want to merely enthral yourself to voices of the gods a la Julian Jaynes' bicameral man, you can, but this is a regression to a prior stage of humanity's development - away from egoic, free willed man, and backwards to more of a reactive automaton, merely a servant of (possibly…

I think there's a meaningful difference between a tool to remind oneself to take a beat before speaking vs being told what to say. For example, cues that help you avoid an impulsive reaction of anger I think is a step away from being a reactive automaton.

My sensibility is that agency is about "noticing". The content of information seems perhaps less important than the attention allocation mechanism that brings our attention to something.

If you write all your own words, but without an ability to direct your attention to what needed words conjured around it, did you really do anything important at all? (Yes, that's perhaps controversial :) )

Re: The Whispering Earring

#20

Post by abeppu »

ryandv wrote: post #11
abeppu wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think there's a meaningful difference between a tool to remind oneself to take a beat before speaking vs being told what to say. For example, cues that help you avoid an impulsive reaction of anger I think is a step away from being a reactive automaton.

Anger is just another aspect of the human condition, and is absolutely justified in cases of grave injustice (case in point: Nazis, racism). It's not for some earring to decide when it is justly applied and when it is not; that is the prerogative of humanity. In either case none of this cueing or prompting needs to be exogenous or originate from some external technology. The Eastern mystics have developed totally end…

Absolutely anger is sometimes justified. But people are also angry when e.g. someone cuts them off in traffic. The initial feeling of anger may not be appropriate. A cue to help you avoid reacting immediately from hostility isn't so much deciding whether anger is appropriate but giving you the space to make that judgement reflectively rather than impulsively. Even if anger is appropriate, the action you want to take on reflection may not be the first one that arises.

"The eastern mystics" managed to do a lot of things, but often with a large amount of dedicated practice. Extremely practiced meditators can also reach intense states of concentration, equanimity etc, but the fact that it's not strictly necessary to have supportive tools to develop these skills doesn't mean that supportive tooling wouldn't help a lot of people.

Post reply on HN