LessWrong 2.0 Reader

I really enjoyed the format of this post. It's very readable. Please do more like this!

For instance, it’s plausible to me that if you heard the verbal loop of a dictator like Stalin, you would hear a lot about serving his country and helping the workers of the world, and very little about maximizing personal power and punishing people for disagreeing with him.

This is a really interesting point, that I've not seen stated explicitly before.

And the follow up paragraph is also very valuable:

That being said, it seems to me like the primary part where security mindset is required is in looking at a particular human brain and deducing that there’s a verbal loop containing useful information at all.

Yeah I think posts aren't appropriate for this. The monthly open thread [LW · GW] is better, post it there?

My constructions are, by definition, in conflict (if you assume map != territory, which is a question of definitions. Let me know if you are using those words differently). How does your thesis differ from "all communication describes a map"?

I have (semi-*)seriously considered the possibility that time travel would in fact instantly destroy the universe (not the multiverse though). One of the theories on what happens when you time travel is based on "postselection", see also youtube video by Seth Lloyd: what you get at the end is what you'd expect if you just discarded any final state that led to a contradiction with what you put in.

Now Seth Lloyd says you then renormalize the probabilities. But this renormalization seems an extraneous assumption to me: a more natural interpretation to me is that the amplitude that would otherwise be associated with the contradictory possibilities simply disappears. It would be hard to time travel without having to have a camel-through-the-eye-of-a-needle level of contortion to prevent some contradiction, so time travel would in effect reliably destroy the universe if it were ever used.

*I am bad at taking things seriously, or I probably wouldn't post this - e.g. imagine if our lack of time travel is due to the anthropic principle.

Also, this is great, and I am sad I didn't know about this for the last month!

I... think this post was impacted by a bug in the LW API that GreaterWrong ran into, that made it so that it wasn't visible on the frontpage when it was published. It nevertheless appears to have gotten some amount of engagement, but maybe that was all from direct links? 

Given the substantial chance that a number of people have never seen this post, I reposted it. Its original publishing date was the 11th of June.

Note: Due to a bug in the LW API that GreaterWrong ran into this post was not visible on the frontpage until now. I reset it's date to make sure that it gets any time in the frontpage (even if it's a month after it's original publishing date, which was the 12th of September)

Note: Due to a bug in the LW API that GreaterWrong ran into, this post wasn't visible until now, but was published 3 days ago. I reset its date to give it proper time on the frontpage.

Recently discovered this old post in my filesystem, so thought I should throw it up online.

To be clear that isn't a real branch of math (afaik)

I figured there was a decent probability of that being the case. I still anticipate it will be a good icebreaker