Those who aspire to perfection

This reads like a personal journal entry. I can't tell to what degree I'm missing necessary context, to what degree you're being puckish, and to what degree this just isn't communication.

It looks like you feel strongly about something going wrong, here; if you can, I'd appreciate you taking the time to state this comprehensibly.

Could you say that in English?

Your posts and comments would be much improved by trying to actually communicate, rather than playing around with oblique LW references to produce gibberish not worth the effort of decoding (even for those who understand the underlying ideas), or outright trolling.

I don't like the whole "Book of Eliezer/Book of Luke" bit. And while I do appreciate the veiled Musashi reference, I think it too detracts from the (very important) message of the post.

Honestly, I'm also not really sure why this is a post rather than a reply or even a PM/email.

If you're saying that not many people (anywhere) are really trying all-out to save the world, or to do any one thing, I agree. I don't understand your description of (a particular kind of) avoiding self-knowledge. I don't understand being afraid of not wanting to save the world.

Could you expand on what you mean by the difference between aspiring rationalists and aspiring aspiring "rationalists"? I don't think we have many people who say things like "I aspire to be an aspiring rationalist", either truly or falsely.

This comment moved here.

truly aspiring rationalists

Does that mean people for whom rationalism is a near-terminal goal that cannot become a lost purpose? Do you use "rationalism" somewhat like the way Charlie Sheen might use "winning", as "rationalism" is often used here?

If yes and no, then to what end rationalism?

If yes and yes, then you value that for someone who, in relation to various things, wants them, that they have as a cherished thing achieving their own wants? Is people having such a nearly-terminal goal a correspondingly deep value of yours, or is it more instrumental? Either way, is coming to value that one of the smaller changes I could make to turn my values towards consistency (and how much more change than coming to consciously value it would I have to do if it is not emergent from my existing values)? If so, at what level would I be valuing that, presumably the same as you do, no? It isn't enough to have a passing devotion to wanting that, that which I want, I should get it?

If this is unclear or badly off-target, let it indicate the magnitude of my confusion as to what you meant.

And for this rare kind of person, telling them

This comes to mind.

[09:28] Eliezer: if I had to take a real-world action, like, guessing someone's name with a gun to my head
[09:29] Eliezer: if I had to choose it would suddenly become very relevant that I knew Michael was one of the most statistically common names, but couldn't remember for which years it was the most common, and that I knew Michael was more likely to be a male name than a female name
[09:29] Eliezer: if an alien had a gun to its head, telling it "I don't know" at this point would not be helpful
[09:29] Eliezer: because there's a whole lot I know that it doesn't
[09:30] X: ok
[09:33] X: what about a question for which you really don't have any information?
[09:33] X: like something only an alien would know
[09:34] Eliezer: if I have no evidence I use an appropriate Ignorance Prior, which distributes probability evenly across all possibilities, and assigns only a very small amount to any individual possibility because there are so many
[09:35] Eliezer: if the person I'm talking to already knows to use an ignorance prior, I say "I don't know" because we already have the same probability distribution and I have nothing to add to that
[09:35] Eliezer: the ignorance prior tells me my betting odds
[09:35] Eliezer: it governs my choices
[09:35] X: and what if you don't know how to use an ignorance prior
[09:36] X: have never heard of it etc
[09:36] Eliezer: if I'm dealing with someone who doesn't know about ignorance priors, and who is dealing with the problem by making up this huge elaborate hypothesis with lots of moving parts and many places to go wrong, then the truth is that I automatically know s/he's wrong
[09:36] Eliezer: it may not be possible to explain this to them, short of training them from scratch in rationality
[09:36] Eliezer: but it is true
[09:36] Eliezer: and if the person trusts me for a rationalist, it may be both honest and helpful to tell them, "No, that's wrong"

Eliezer obviously wouldn't be telling them to shut up and be evil; he'd be intending to tell the person he'd infer he was talking to that, and if this "rare person" couldn't learn about Eliezer's actual intent by inferring the message Eliezer had intended to communicate to who Eliezer ought to have thought he was talking to, the person would be rarely dense.

So that part of Eliezer's message is not flawed, so I'm not sure why you thought it needed addressing.

This assumes I'm reading this post correctly, something I'm not confident of.

(Apparently posts get moved to Discussion if they get downvoted enough. Cool.)