Open Thread: April 2009

Happened to me too! I panicked, deleted all of my developing posts, and wrote a note of apology to the forum for all the nonsense I accidentally posted. (Fortunately, I figured it out -- everything was still a draft, including my apology.)

You might well lose more respect from them for being taken in by the wrong position in the first place. Or even, if they're particularly good rationalists and you aren't careful, by being too easily persuaded to change your mind.

If you mean to say that we should be less persuaded of that signal than we might otherwise be, I can see a counterargument: lots of people couldn't bear to publically admit to being wrong even on a topic they chose for that purpose.

If you remove votes by people below a karma cutoff, then the people who have karma control access to karma. I don't really think it would be a problem here; but I have seen that same mechanism wreak havoc on a different electronic community.

I am new as well, and even under-versed in most of the common phrases. But I am starting to comment anyway because of the karma rating. My score does not mean much to me in terms of status, so I don't care if it drops to nothing. To me, it is a marker of how much of what I say is interesting to other people. It is feedback that allows me to improve. I cannot get that feedback unless I comment, so I comment.

Sadly, we do want newcomers to take extra care, and indeed that's pretty much normal - for example, it's usually good to lurk for a bit in a new community before contributing. It looks like that care is paying off for you, which to me seems to indicate that the karma system has been a success in this instance.

"I realize it's not practical to separate out new people from potential trolls."

If that isn't practical, then our criteria for identifying 'trolling' need some serious revision.

You'd think that a site called "Less Wrong" would be concerned about distinguishing between types of comments, but...

But this isn't the source of shouldness we are looking for. Buried deep in the human mind is a legitimate utility function, or at least something like one, which summarizes that human's terminal values

No. It's more that if you extrapolate out the preferences we already have, asking what we would prefer if we had time for our chaotic preferences to resolve themselves, then you end up with a superior sort of shouldness to which our present preferences might well defer. Sort of like if you knew that your future self would be a vegetarian, you might regard your present consumption of meat as an error. But it's not hidden away as something that already exists. It's something that could be computed from us, but which we don't explicitly represent.

Sounds about right, except that I wouldn't call this anything close to a summary of the whole position. Also, compare the status of morality with that of probability (e.g. Probability is Subjectively Objective, Can Counterfactuals Be True?, Math is Subjunctively Objective).

I'm not sure what do you see in the distinction between simple preference and complex preference. No matter how simple an imperfect agent is, you face a problem of going from imperfect decision-making to ideal preference order.

The (effective) utility functions are different enough to produce fighting and wars.

The problem is that the utility functions refer to "me" - and that's different in every single case.

There is a large complication in that we call something "moral" when we want other people to do it. So there are probably things that we call "moral" that are actually "sins" according to our internal utility functions.

see: http://lesswrong.com/lw/31/what_do_we_mean_by_rationality/ - comments here

ETA: maybe that's not the same question. Should we think about what a 'rationalist' is?

No need to worry if you're not regularly getting downvoted, if you ask me.

Just read your last 5 comments and they looked useful to me, including most with 1 karma point. I would keep posting whenever you have information to add, and take actual critiques in replies to your comments much more seriously than lack of karma. Hope this helps.. Rob zahra

Not by my book.

One of the arguments for having a karma system is so that posters don't have to self-censor. With no karma system, posters have to spend time worry about being polite and not hogging the discussion, and maybe worthwhle comments fail to get made, lost either to self-censorship or running out of time. Given the lack of social clues, body language, facial expressions, etc, on a discussion board like this you could spend a great deal of time worring to no useful effect.

Commenting can be pretty addictive. I predict (confidence 30%) that within two months you will be hooked but will have run out of things to say. So you will start posting crap comments and, after a period of grace, get hammered with a lot of almost automatic down votes. Shrug. That's life. It might be nice it you can avoid this, but it is not that important in the great scheme of things, so don't try too hard nor care too deeply if you screw up.

I certainly don't think so, according to my vision for lesswrong, but if you are - then I definitely am.

you've passed me since the auto-upvote was turned off, so if one of us needs to worry about this, it's me.

I've been putting some of my notes on learning and independent study together into sort of mini-essays (and a couple not so mini) on my blog http://williambswift.blogspot.com/ . Some of the things I've written about so far are:

Knowing Lots of Facts

Why Learning

Optimism - Dangers and Benefits

Assorted Comments on Tools

Plateaus in Learning

Learning Journal and Record

Depth of Knowledge

Stages of Study

Commitment

The Value of Mistakes: Mistakes and Learning

Getting Things Right by Avoiding Mistakes

The most recent post Knowing Lots of Facts actually grew out of a comment I posted here on LW. I haven't posted any of these essays here because they seem rather peripheral to the actual content of LW, though some of them directly address the title theme of getting things Less Wrong.

PS - I intended to make a simple single space list, but it either ran them all together or required me to double-space the list. What can I do about it?

me too (Maria_Byrne)

At the IRC meetup, Eliezer said that a new wiki will be hosted on lesswrong.com, and the articles will be moved from wikia. Thus, presently it might be a bad idea to advertise the location of temporary wiki, as links to it will die in the near future. I guess it's also a reason to postpone the discussion of guidelines for wiki/blog usage.

I voted up, so couldn't say.

I agree with the below. It seemed poorly-written and uninteresting. I feel like it's not worth anyone's time to read it. The "I want my time back" interpretation.

I couldn't see your point. Your questions seem to be either too vague, or solved. The perception could be reversed with better editing.

If you promise you won't be mad :-)

I guess I read it thinking "where's the thing I haven't already thought about?".

Rationalist hardliner response: stop slacking off, hurry up and make a lot of money. There must be some way to convert that extra time into wealth. Then donate some of the money to a project, or start your own.

Not everyone agrees with me on this - evangelism has bad associations - but I currently think that spreading rationalism itself enough to change the incentives for politicians would be a worthy goal.

There was this post and if you're good at Python we've got plenty of open issues.

Whatever it is you want to do with your life. I can't think of many fields in which a rational outlook wouldn't be of use. This goes back to fundamental values, interests, talents, etc. -- the dictates of rationalism can't decide everything for you.

The convention for tags seems to be the use of underscores, so it should be open_thread, not openthread.

I'm intrigued... were there any changes you noticed that would be relevant to this community?

What parameters did you track your rationality / calmness on?

How about bodily energy levels? - muscle mass is affected by testosterone, i have read.

How much time you were spending/using up earlier thinking about sex?

What personal goal other than becoming more rational have you achieved? - the sacrifice you have made is huge. I would've asked from the devil more than my due here.

What marginal benefit did castration give you that earlier testoterone lowering drugs did not?

Why did you do that?

no replies, and positive karma -- does that mean I just set the standard?

I think you're fine-- but then I adore em-dashes.

I don't think so.

Is there a way to browse all the titles posted since LW began?

Yes.

If memory serves, it was Tell Your Rationalist Origin Story

Also, am I the only person who has problems dieting because sometimes, for causes yet to be identified, hunger can trigger a migraine?

It doesn't for me, but a quick Google suggests that blood sugar and migraines are at least somewhat related, though I'm fuzzy on the details of how. That might be (but might also not be) mechanism for hunger triggering your migraines. You should get a test kit and find out; if that is the reason, then you can design a diet which won't cause migraines, and measurements will help you do so.