Open Thread May 2 - May 8, 2016

Thanks for posting this. I've forwarded it to tech support.

How do you find new accounts?

To my eye, there are... an unusual number of new accounts jumping immediately into posting, lately. None of them have Eugine's trademark style or focus on his preferred topics, however.

I am getting hit for 10 points or so per day

My question is: why the heck are you such a dangerous person to Eugene? What point of view do you hold that Eugene deems so worthy of mass downvoting? Ironically for him, now I want to know.

Remark: a policy of pushing all someone's comments down to exactly -1 is worse (for LW, whether or not for the victim) than a policy of downvoting them all n times, for specific n, because it erases information. Suppose I post a stupid comment that someone votes down to -1, and an insightful one that gets up to +4; then along comes Eugine, leaves the first alone and votes the other one down to -1. And now they look exactly the same; Eugine has removed not only the evidence of my insight in the second case, but also the evidence of my stupidity in the first.

The information isn't completely gone; from any comment whose net score isn't zero and whose total number of votes isn't too large you can reconstruct the upvote and downvote numbers by looking at the "% positive" figure. But that doesn't distinguish between Eugine-downvotes and other downvotes, and e.g. the parent of this comment which is currently on (+2,56%) could be either +9-7 or +10-8. And, more to the point, "can be roughly determined by doing some calculation" is rather different from "can be seen immediately"; even in so far as the information isn't lost, it's severely obscured.

The more successful Eugine is in making karma uninformative, the less grounds he has for hoping that mass-downvoting someone will ruin their reputation or drive them away. But I doubt he's thinking clearly enough or long-term enough for this to change his behaviour.

... Whether the parent of this is on +9-7 or +10-8, that's more than 5 downvotes. Either Eugine is now using more downvote-socks, or some other people dislike it. The latter hypothesis is plausible: I can easily imagine someone reading it and thinking "oh, for God's sake get this meta whining off LW". FWIW, my reasons for not shutting up about it are (1) I think it's of some anthropological interest, (2) I still have some hope that some day it will provoke the moderators into actually stopping and/or undoing Eugine's mass-downvoting, and (3) I have reason to think that unfortunately Eugine's behaviour has been instrumental in driving a bunch of people away from LW and hope that keeping it visible will make it less effective and therefore less likely to push people away. And, I confess, (4) I hope to mitigate any reputational effect his attacks might have on me by reminding readers that if it weren't for Eugine's vendetta my 30-day karma would be somewhere around +220 rather than +12 :-). Anyway, if anyone reading this has strong opinions about whether I should shut up about this stuff, I'd be interested to know them.

He is hitting Nancy, myself, yourself, Gleb, and possibly others. ETA: Other suspected recipients of his impotent rage: ChristianKI (low-priority target?).

All of which I find... tactically stupid. If he targeted me, well, I don't care, and nobody else would care. (And hell, I'm the one who riled him up, so it would even make something like sense.) Targeting you and Gleb is targeting bystanders; that is likely to produce administrative response.

Targeting Nancy as well, however?

I poked the tiger. It decided to try to maul the dragon in response.

agreed.

This is rude to say, but I honestly believe that the technical support of LW does not give a fuck about Eugine, and their cooperation is lukewarm at best. Otherwise the problem would be already solved years ago.

Really, how difficult it would be create a script that would revert all Eugine's votes? Let's suppose it would take a week of work. So? More than hundred weeks have already passed, and nothing happened.

Without cooperation of the technical support, there is not much a moderator could do, other than playing whack-a-mole with the new accounts. Which, as we see, does not work, because Eugine just creates new accounts, and the downvotes made by the old ones stay there.

he already GOT what he wanted. Many people left as a result of his campaign, and Less Wrong entered something of a downward spiral from which it never fully recovered.

I don't think Eugine wanted to destroy LW at that point in time.

small-group politics is as mindkilling as large-group politics. I'd like to hear a lot less about the topic (though I do support software changes to make bad actors less harmful, such as tracking votes to be able to undo banned-account voting, and soft-bans where the target doesn't realize it's banned - it can vote and post, but nobody else ever sees).

I don't agree that he's had all that much impact, I was around for the original harassment - it was annoying, but didn't change the direction of movement - the diaspora had already started. It may have accelerated things a hair.

The difference now may be that LW has lost enough thought leaders and original posters for "finger on the scale" manipulation to actually have an effect. I'd argue that to the extent it's true, we're already dead.

It's not that I think AI is spectacularly hard, I just don't think we can do Hard Things anymore.

I'm sympathetic to the idea that we can't do Hard Things, at least in the US and much of the rest of the West. Unfortunately progress in AI seems like the kind of Hard Thing that still is possible. Stagnation has hit atoms, not bits. There does seem to be a consensus that AI is not a stagnant field at all, but rather one that is consistently progressing.

Is there a way we can discuss civilizational issues without becoming mind-killed?

A LWer created Omnilibrium for that.

Is there a way we can discuss civilizational issues without becoming mind-killed?

Sure there is. Start with the usual rationalist mantra: what do you believe? Why do you believe it?
How would you describe this Great Stagnation? Why do you believe we are headed towards this?
And let us pick up from there.

LessWrong, and rationalists in general, probably have a blind spot relative to questions of civilizational inadequacy because those questions relate to political issues, and we don't talk about politics.

I don't think "we don't talk about politics" is true to the extend that people are going to have blind spots about it. Politics isn't completely banned from LW. There are many venues from facebook discussions with LW folks, Yvain's blog, various EA fora and omnilibrium that also are about politics.

I think we even had the question of whether people believe we are in a great stagnation in a past census.

I think the main reason is that I am 10x more pessimistic about the health of human civilization than most other rationalists.

How do you know? Did you actually look at the relevant census numbers to come to that conclusion? If so, quoting the numbers would make your post more data driven and more substantial. If you goal is to have important discussion about civilizational issues being more data driven can be quite useful.

I just don't think we can do Hard Things anymore

The humanity or just the West?

Is there a way we can discuss civilizational issues without becoming mind-killed?

I don't see why not.

do we simply have to accept that civilizational issues are going to create a large error bar of uncertainty around our predictions?

That, too. That large error bar of uncertainty isn't going to go away even if we talk about the issues :-)

Neither would necessarily the handling of some kind of lab equipment, if there was some clear documentation available for you

In practice, learning to handle certain lab equipment outside of an institutional context is sometimes hard because it's much easier to break expensive stuff if you don't have someone looking over your work the first few times you do something. Of course, you qualified your above statement quite well, so you haven't said anything incorrect. :)

What skills are overwhelmingly easier to learn in institutionalized context?

Heh.

Adjective: institutionalized

1. of or relating to something that has been established as an institution It is very difficult to get bureaucracies to abandon their institutionalized practices.

2. of or relating to someone who has been committed to an institution, such as a prison or an insane asylum Once a potential employer learns that you've been institutionalized, you can forget about getting the job.

Speaking as somebody who frequently engages in non-nice methodologies:

Niceness is more convincing. Way more convincing. And if you can get somebody to be mean enough to you, while you're being nice, that somebody feels like they should defend you, cognitive dissonance will push them to believe in your beliefs a little bit more.

If some people are nice, and some people are mean, we're injecting some very subtle irrationality into people reading our discourse.

So there is an advantage in picking one and sticking to it. (Or my policy, which is to match the tone of my opponent as well as I can.) And niceness is probably an easier schelling point that meanness.

A Suite of Pragmatic Considerations in Favor of Niceness

Isn't the content of the message the only important thing?

Content is multi-level. A chunk of text often means more than the literal reading of the words.

People use forums for many things. Sometimes it's to inform, sometimes it's to set out a position, sometimes it's to vent and bitch, sometimes it's to just wave a dick around, sometimes it's to play social games, etc. It helps to figure out quickly to which category a message belongs and the style or tone of the message (here: nice or mean) is important. Think of it as a fuzzy tag, an email header line, a hint at how this message should be interpreted.

It's not simple, of course, and there is a lot of misdirection and false flags and signaling and counter signaling... basically, it's humans communicating :-)

Of course. I know already, okay? Thanks.

Is there anything in your post where you think that a likely reader doesn't already know what you are arguing?

On a forum with a "snarky" debating culture, the predictable reaction is everyone making fun and not even considering the issue seriously

That seems like arguing against a strawman.

Possibly just random? There's a feedback effect where if LW is quiet one day, there's less to respond to the next day so it is likely to remain quiet -- so I think smallish random fluctuations can easily produce week-long droughts or gluts.

More and more people have drifted away and not been replaced by active posters. There are still a few topics around more traditional LW topics but not attracting much discussion. The most active discussions seem to be around a single member whose attempts at disruption have been entirely successful at multiple levels. Some of the more prolific remaining are judged, via downvotes and commentary, to be of low quality, and little contentful discussion ensues. There are still a few debates or arguments outside meta topics but they are mostly covering familiar ground.

LW is not a well kept garden any longer, one may wonder whether it is even a garden. LW2.0 is often mentioned as a glorious future but it's looking pretty bleak around LW1.0 in the present.

Maybe students in some universities have midterms?

The numbers appear to be more or less made up.

http://nostalgebraist.tumblr.com/post/143718406034/the-future-of-humanity-institute-seems-very

People on Hacker News and reddit.com/r/bitcoin are sceptical.

Do we know which country Wright was living in during 2010?

I use Volume Locker to keep myself from changing volume by accidentally pressing buttons when picking up my phone.

have you looked for apps that will do this? something that does the effect of "twilight" on screens but for volume. Have you checked the parental control tools? Have you considered getting the kid a hearing test?

Look for kid headphones with maximum child safe volume levels.

If she's smart enough to understand words then just tell her not to do it. Take away the tablet whenever she disobeys.

If she's too young for that, tape over the part of the thing that she could press, or just hang it out of reach playing something happy.

NZ epidemiologist Pearson A.L appears to have predicted the trans-pacific partnership in 2014

Given that the trans-pacific partnership negotiations started in 2008 and were first sheduled to end in 2012 predicting it in 2014 seems like a feat that doesn't have much to do with predictions but just with being up to date about what's currently negotiated.

Well, what are your beliefs and feelings about intimacy and sex? If you imagine yourself accepting the offers, what would it mean about you? Imagine it like a movie, and then what your parents (or other important people) would say about that.

(I suspect there is something negative, either directly about you e.g. "if you don't lead, then you are weak", or about the girl and then indirectly about you e.g. "if she initiates, she is a slut; and you are a loser if you date a slut".)

Why do I stave off the attention of women?

I've had similar reactions in the past. There are a couple reasons, I think. Fear or rejection of the unknown, of jumping into new social situations. Nearsightedness in wanting everything to go perfectly the first time so much that you don't get practice at making things go well. Fear of exposing myself to rejection, coupled with harder to describe feelings of low romantic or sexual worth. The feeling that you don't really know for absolutely sure that you want to spend a ton of time with the person you're flirting with, so you shouldn't follow through.

Two things have helped me with this. The first is increasing my self-worth a little. You can probably think of men less physically attractive than you who have had perfectly happy relationships. Try to understand what makes them attractive people (I tend to think of this as "falling in love" in miniature). In fact, I've found this exercise of trying to see the lovable in other people is a pretty good one in general. Anyhow, you can do this on yourself too. You have plenty of good points, I guarantee it.

The second thing was just jumping into those novel social situations. I have a mantra for it, even: "I would regret not doing it, therefore I will do it."

First, Bostrom is very explicit that the conclusion of his argument is not "We are probably living in a simulation". The conclusion of his argument is that at least one of the following three claims is very likely to be true -- (1) humans won't reach the post-human stage of technological development, (2) post-human civilizations will not run a significant number of simulations of their ancestral history, or (3) we are living in a simulation.

Second, Bostrom has addressed the objection you raise here (in his Simulation Argument FAQ, among other places). He essentially flips your disjunctive reasoning around. He argues that we are either in a simulation or we are not. if we are in simulation, then claim 3 is obviously true, by hypothesis. If we are not in a simulation, then our ordinary empirical evidence is a veridical guide to the universe (our universe, not some other universe). This means the evidence and assumptions used as the basis for the simulation argument are sound in our universe. It follows that since claim 3 is false by hypothesis, either claim 1 or claim 2 is very likely to be true. It's worth noting that these two are claims about our universe, not about some parent universe.

In other words, your objection is based on the argument that if we are in a simulation, there is no good reason to trust the assumptions of the simulation argument (such as assumptions about how our simulators will behave). Bostrom's reply is that if we are in a simulation, then his conclusion is true anyway, even if the specific reasoning he uses doesn't apply. If we are not in a simulation, then the reasoning he uses does apply, so his conclusion is still true.

There does seem to be some sort of sleight-of-mind going on here, if you want my opinion. I generally feel that way about most non-trivial uses of anthropic reasoning. But the exact source of the sleight is not easy for me to detect. At the very least, Bostrom has a prima facie response to your objection, so you need to say something about why his response is flawed. Making your objection and Bostrom's response mathematically precise would be a good way to track down the flaw (if any).

If we are in a simulation, all of our logic will not be universal but instead will be a reaction to the perverted rules set up by the simulation's creators.

While I do not agree on the conclusion of the simulation argument, I think your rebuttal is flawed: we can safely reason about the reality outside simulation if we presume that we are inside a realistic simulation, that is a simulation whose purpose is to mimic as closely as possible the reality outside. I don't know if it's made explicit in the exposition you read, but I've always assumed the argument was about a realistic simulation. Indeed, if the law of physics are computable, you can have even have an emulation argument.

you cannot reason about without our universe from within our universe. It doesn't make sense to do so.

Of course you can. Anyone who talks about any sort of 'multiverse' - or even causally disconnected regions of 'our own universe' - is doing precisely this, whether they realize it or not.

Hm. Let me try to restate that to make sure I follow you.

Consider three categories of environments: (Er) real environments, (Esa) simulated environments that closely resemble Er, aka "ancestral simulations", and (Esw) simulated environments that dont't closely resemble Er, aka "weird simulations."

The question is, is my current environment E in Er or not?

Bostrom's argument as I understand it is that if post-human civilizations exist and create many Esa-type environments, then for most E, (E in Esa) and not (E in Er). Therefore, given that premise I should assume (E in Esa).

Your counterargument as I understand it is that if (E in Esw) then I can draw no sensible conclusions about Er or Esa, because the logic I use might not apply to those domains, so given that premise I should assume nothing.

Have I understood you?

Seems like you're just falling for partisan media histrionics and conflating a lot of different things out of context.

On Fox News, Trump said that regarding Muslims in the US, he would do "unthinkable" things, "and certain things will be done that we never thought would happen in this country".

In context, Trump is giving a tough-sounding but vague and non-committal response to questions about whether there should be a digital database of Muslims in the country. He later partially walked this back, saying it was a leading question from a reporter and he meant we should have terrorism watch lists. Which obviously already exist.

I've read Cory Doctorow's Little Brother, and this might be a generalization from fictional evidence, but I can't help asking: As a foreign student in the US, how likely is Trump to have me tortured for no reason?

I'd say it's about as likely as you giving yourself a heart attack reading political outrage porn.

assume, as a rule of thumb, that politicians intend to fulfill all their promises.

This is a horrible rule of thumb. It's not anywhere close to true, and even if it were, their ability lags their intent by orders of magnitude. Instead, assume that politicians will very slightly alter existing trends in order to encourage their constituents.

I suspect you are at somewhat higher risk of being targetted by officials for your foreign-ness than you were last year. Trump being president will somewhat increase as well, but more because it'll be a sign that the general populace is more racist than we thought than because of any actual policy change.

I think it's really unlikely you'd be imprisoned or tortured, with or without Trump, unless there are stronger ties to enemy groups than just your nationality.

"As a foreign student in the US, how likely is Trump to have me tortured for no reason?"

It's hard to judge, but I think having a pro-torture president will make use of torture by the police more likely. My feeling is that you aren't in clear and present danger, and institutional changes take time.

You are not as safe as someone with a non-Arabic name.

My feeling is that you don't need a go bag, but you might as well start researching other places which would be good for you to live.

Hitler had a huge party of supporters behind him that he spend a decade gathering around him. Trump on the other hand is much more of an one-man show. One of the biggest role of the president is making personal choices and there simply no comparable pool of talent. Under a Trump administration someone like Chris Christie who's a long-term friend of the Trump family is likely going to get a post in his administration.

When it comes to totalitarism it's a mistake to assume that the past will repeat exactly the same way. It's hard to believe a US government would simply torture random people with Arabic names intentionally just because they have Arab names. It's more likely that privacy will get completely eroded. Today we have face recognition that's strong enough to hook up all camera's on streets to it and get general movement profiles. Forbidding encryption would also be on the table.

The World Coal Associationis non-profit so perhaps we shouldn’t fetishise the term non-profit, or the term coal?

I couldn't parse this. What do you mean?