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I think the nearest deadline is our own lifespans. FAI is no good if you're dead before it comes along. Also cryonics requires fast economic growth.
Here are my five minutes: nanomachines need to carry a charge to be accelerable, right? Well, it works the other way too - they will decelerate on their own in destination's Van Allen belts.
You may be interested in http://www.dancarlin.com/disp.php/csarchive/Show-234---Aiming-for-Effectiveness/guns-shootings-firearms
That's why I'm asking how much. How much money do you want? As in, total.
The reason is that the pay-per-download model is detrimental for LessWrong's goals. As DSimon said, we want as many people as possible to be exposed to LW ideas. People who haven't heard of LW, people who would never themselves pay for such content. But I want your podcasts be played on the radio.
Instead I propose the Kickstarter model - you name your price, the LW crowd raises the money, you then have no problem giving copies away for free because you've already been paid.
How much for releasing an episode under CC-BY?
As many bottles of wine as can fit.
Wow, your answer exceeds all my expectations! Thank you.
I respectfully request an explanation of the merits of publishing like this when you have the entire fic written already.
Harry Potter is about the wizarding world. Avatar is about a world war. MLP is about people.
Mind blown, then blown again.
After two years of bronydom, I dreamed of ponies for the first time after reading this fic. So that's a 10 out of 10. I'm reminded of Eliezer's warning about imagining worlds so much better than reality that the act sucks out your soul.
In case you're interested in suggestions for improvement:
- Make this fic more accessible to others, not just super smart LW bronies - the text has words that could be replaced with more common synonyms, for example.
- Make it less silly. Computers in Earth's mantle and indestructible experience centers while possible are so impractical it's ridiculous. This isn't Star Wars!
- What about all the people who care about reality? The story conspicuously completely ignores them. I imagine they would petition Celestia to make physical pony bodies for them so they could continue their work on or study of the physical Universe. And almost everypony would object to the destruction of life on Earth.
Haven't followed Steve since about 2008. What has he been up to? Is he still newageous?
Riga reporting. Will the meetup be in English?
Okay, I give up.
I have no dependents.
How do I estimate the probability of early death or disability?
What other multinational life insurance companies are there?
Which are the other four?
Now, all that's left to do is convince the world that nukes are not evil so we can build an Orion drive powered ship and colonize that planet.
LessWrong... IN SPACE!
Just give us a proper forum already!
THIS IS WHY WE NEED A FORUM
or something
I was offered life insurance by an Alico agent. What do you guys think? I don't know what I don't know about life insurance, so throw me all you've got.
I would get 36k€ if I was crippled 50% or more and 20k€ if I died or survived till 62, all for 260€ a year (that's 5% of my current salary). Does anyone know what injuries constitute what crippledness %?
Here's a tiny bit of rationality:
The new arrivals [soldiers who'd died and gone to hell only to keep fighting] didn’t fight the demon way, for pride and honor. Rahab realized they fought for other reasons entirely, they fought to win and woe to anybody who got in their way.
Some things
For example?
Looks like I've been using "terminal values" incorrectly.
If that distinction exists, my three formulations are not identical. Yes?
Well, all agents are resource-constrained. But I get what you mean.
My mom complains I take things too literally. Now I know what she means. :)
Seriously though, I mean readable, usable, computable information. The kind which can conceivably turned into knowledge. I could also say, we want to lossly compress the Universe, like an mp3, with as good a ratio as possible.
Neither. I guess I shouldn't have used the term "terminal value". See the elaboration - how do you think I should generalize and summarize it?
We cannot know what information we might need in the future, therefore we must gather as much as we can and preserve all of it. Especially since much (most?) of it cannot be recreated on demand.
Help me, LessWrong. I want to build a case for
- Information is a terminal value without exception.
- All information is inherently good.
- We must gather and preserve information for its own sake.
These phrasings should mean the exact same thing. Correct me if they don't.
Elaboration: Most people readily agree that most information is good most of the time. I want to see if I can go all the way and build a convincing argument that all information is good all of the time, or as close to it as I can get. That misuse of information is problem about the misuser and not the information ("guns don't kill people"). Specific cases include: endangered species (DNA is best stored in living organisms), viruses (all three kinds), forbidden books, child pornography and other shocking information, free speech, Archive.org, The Rosetta Project, research on race.
Please post arguments and counterarguments in their own comments and separately from general discussion comments.
It's 2 PM and I still haven't done any work today. Thanks. :(
A tangent: if we found extinct life on Mars, it would provide precious extra motivation to go there which is a good thing.
If LessWrong is based on Reddit, and Reddit can spawn subreddits at will, why can't LessWrong do the same?
I value time spent in flow times the amount of I/O between me and the external world.
"Time spent in flow" is a technical term for having a good time.
By I/O (input/output) I mean both information and actions. Talking to people, reading books, playing multiplayer computer games, building pyramids, writing software to be used by other people are examples of high impact of me on the world and/or high impact of the world on me. On the other hand, getting stoned (or, wireheaded) and daydreaming has low interaction with the external world. Some of it is okay though because it's an experience I can talk to other people about.
Where's the "neither" option? I don't like open threads, but neither I do going off site. Why can't we have a sub-lesswrong?
Actually, fuck it.
Come on, guys, we can do better than image macros.
What, really? Wait, what!? Uh.
- Could you please answer my question directly in the form of "yes/no, because"?
- Do you mean by subjective probability the fact(?) that probability is about the map and not the territory?
- If yes, what does it have to do with anthropics?
- If yes, what! Contrary?? I learned about it here!
- If no, I'm completely confused.
Also, dear reader, vote parent up or down to tell me whether he's correct about you.
Can we dismiss all anthropic reasoning by saying that probability is meaningless for singular events? That is, the only way to obtain probability is from statistics, and I cannot run repeated experiments of when, where, and as what I exist.
When rational argument fails, fall back to dark arts. If that fails, fall back to damage control (discredit him in front of others). All that assuming it's worth the trouble.
Finally get to play Crysis.
Write a real time ray tracer.
Explaining it would ruin the funnies. Also, Google. Also, inevitably, somebody else did the job for me.
The voting system is of utmost importance and I'd rather be inconvenienced by the current system than have a karma-free zone on this site.
On a serious note, what is your (the reader's) favorite argument against a forum?
("I voted you down because this is not a meta thread." is also a valid response.)
Are you guys still not tired of trying to shoehorn a reddit into a forum?
ಠ_ಠ ....ashdkfrflguhhhhhhhhh
Debug output: when I first saw your request, I was in a very, what's the word, eager(?) mood and started writing, then realized it would be very long, then I wanted to chat and brag about coding skills, then later my mood was lower than average, and you said "yes", and I was like, groan, and... aaanyway, my Skype is cannibalsmith. If you catch me, I'll probably will be delighted to talk about programming. Yeah, so... uh...
You should clarify that you're talking about epistemic rationality a lot sooner than the 8th paragraph.
when they are after the truth rather than after winning a debate.
To win at life you must be willing to lose at debate.
Please improve upon this slogan/proverb.