From: Anders Sandberg (asa@nada.kth.se)
Date: Wed Jan 13 1999 - 14:20:04 MST
"Eliezer S. Yudkowsky" <sentience@pobox.com> writes:
> "Keith M. Elis" wrote:
> >
> > "Eliezer S. Yudkowsky" wrote:
> > >
> > > Welcome, Keith M. Elis to the very small group of people whom I guess,
> > > from personal observation, to be relatively sane.
> >
> > How small would you say?
>
> Me, you, Greg Egan, Mitchell Porter, Billy Brown, Eric Watt Forste and
> Lee Daniel Crocker; possibly Anders Sandburg, Max More, Walter John
> Williams, Lawrence Watt-Evans, Carl Feynman and Socrates; and quite a
> few people I can't think of offhand. But almost certainly no more than
> twenty all told.
I'm deeply honored to be possibly included in this set :-)
> No offense intended to those omitted; sanity is a highly specialized
> mental discipline, comparable to Zen meditation or lucid dreaming.
Interesting idea. I think rational thinking is something we have to
learn, but that we have some built in facilities for learning just
like we has a built in facility for learning languages. But you can
train your rationality more or less.
Sanity might be something similar. I would guess it is really composed
by several components that synergize, like rationality, emotional
maturity and good metaprograms.
> There are two main pieces of advice I can give you:
> 1. Catch yourself lying to yourself. If you can just once perceive the
> sensation of knowing the truth but refusing to acknowledge it, you can
> apply the lesson and clean out your entire mind.
Very good advice. Overall, the ability to notice what is going on in
one's mind is important in self-transformation.
-- ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Anders Sandberg Towards Ascension! asa@nada.kth.se http://www.nada.kth.se/~asa/ GCS/M/S/O d++ -p+ c++++ !l u+ e++ m++ s+/+ n--- h+/* f+ g+ w++ t+ r+ !y
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