Lots of details below the cut, but basically it boils down to a plea for "this is how I handled it" stories about confronting parents about religion and different lifestyles--particularly when my "different" lifestyle is not so different at all. I was raised in a fringe Christian...

Just a couple of items tonight that have caught my eye. First, (someone break out the orchestra and start the sympathy music) former attorney general Alberto Gonzales asks, “What did I do that was so fundamentally wrong, that deserves this kind of response to my service?” He said this in...

Every now and then, one reads an article about the Singularity in which some reporter confidently asserts, "The Singularitarians, followers of Ray Kurzweil, believe that they will be uploaded into techno-heaven while the unbelievers languish behind or are extinguished by the machines." I d...

When I gave the BDSM presentation this fall to the Human Sexuality class, one of the questions asked was, ‘How do you make up from fights?” I actually had to pause because Master and I don’t fight. Really, I don’t just ignore that part of our life here on this blog; there rea...

I’ve been thinking. Since I’m not an ironclad expert on … well, much of anything … what I think I bring to any discussion table is the interest in critical thought. And, as I’ve mentioned in past posts here at sustainablog, even that contribution – or the interest in making i...

Followup to:  Underconstrained Abstractions Previously: So if it's not as simple as just using the one trick of finding abstractions you can easily verify on available data, what are some other tricks to use? There are several, as you might expect... Previously I talked about "permitted po...

Followup to:  Is That Your True Rejection? I expected from the beginning, that the difficult part of two rationalists reconciling a persistent disagreement, would be for them to expose the true sources of their beliefs. One suspects that this will only work if each party takes responsibility fo...

This Friendly AI discussion has taken more time than I planned or have.  So let me start to wrap up.  On small scales we humans evolved to cooperate via various pair and group bonding mechanisms.  But these mechanisms aren't of much use on today's evolutionarily-unprecedented large sc...

It happens every now and then, that the one encounters some of my transhumanist-side beliefs - as opposed to my ideas having to do with human rationality - strange, exotic-sounding ideas like superintelligence and Friendly AI.  And the one rejects them. If the one is called upon to explain the ...

Followup to:  The Weak Inside View Saith Robin: "It is easy, way too easy, to generate new mechanisms, accounts, theories, and abstractions.  To see if such things are useful, we need to vet them, and that is easiest "nearby", where we know a lot.  When we want to deal ...