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For the interests of identity obfuscation, I have rolled a random number between 1 and 100, and have waited for some time afterwards.
On a 1-49: I have taken the survey, and this post was made after a uniformly random period of up to 24 hours.
On a 50-98: I will take the survey after a uniformly random period of up to 72 hours.
On a 99-100: I have not actually taken the survey. Sorry about that, but this really has to be a possible outcome.
Protips:
- Given both demographics and recent discourse, you are going to want vegetarian and vegan options for food.
- HPMOR has a large hatedom, for various reasons. Key vectors for trolls are photos, videos, and flyers. Be more conscious than usual about personal boundaries and privacy.
- Public events are going to bring together people with varying viewpoints; be emotionally prepared for having your bubble popped by culture shock.
- Betting pools on the number of clueless attendees who showed up for the Potter and forgot about the Rationality are generally frowned upon by the general public. (That means you, Hanson!)
- Don't be gross, in either appearance or manners.
- Don't hand out pamphlets to the general public; it looks, you know...
The timeline continues with legal actions and arguments about what happened, but has no additional allegations.
You forgot me.
August 13th, 2013
Dallas J. Haugh
Dallas posts a suicide note which includes allegations of rape against Shermer. It is taken down by a relative when he is secured and taken to a hospital; after he’s released, he reposts it.
Allegedly.
I don't really feel the need to write that when I am aware of it from personal experience.
Keep in mind the fact that he is a serial rapist, which kind of undermines his thesis.
I actually calibrated my P(God) and P(Supernatural) based on P(Simulation), figuring that getting an exact figure for cases where (~Simulation & Supernatural) are basically noise.
I forgot what I actually defined "God" as for my probability estimation, as well as the actual estimation.
Your updates to your blog as of this post seem to replace "Less Wrong", or "MIRI", or "Eliezer Yudkowsky", with the generic term "AI risk advocates".
This just sounds more insidiously disingenuous.
I've had to deal with the stress you are contributing to putting on the broader perception of transhumanism for the weekend, and that is on top of preexisting mental problems. (Whether MIRI/LW is actually representative to this is entirely orthogonal to the point; public perception has and is shifting towards viewing the broader context of futurism as run by neoreactionaries and beige-os with parareligious delusions.)
Of course, that's no reason to stop anything. People are going to be stressed by things independent of their content.
But you are expecting an entity which you have devoted most of blog to criticizing to be caring enough about your psychological state that they take time out to write header statements for each of your posts?
If you want to stop accusations of lying and bad faith, stop spreading the "LW believes in Roko's Basilisk" meme, and do something less directly reputation-warfare escalatory, and more productive-- like hunting down Nazis and creating alternatives to the current decision-theoretic paradigm. (I don't think anybody's going to get that upset over abstract discussions of Newcomb's Problem. At least, I hope.)
Paperclip maximizer, obviously. Basilisks typically are static entities, and I'm not sure how you would go about making a credible anti-paperclip 'infohazard'.
I completed the survey. (Did not do the digit ratio questions due to lack of available precise tools.)
Can you be slightly more specific on the context? Like, at least the vague fields of study it might apply to? This would allow us to make an informed decision.
"Is a even better joke than the previous joke when preceded by its quotation" is actually much funnier when followed by something completely different.
It seems like the both of you just want everyone to use efficient RVs.
Perhaps a travelling Less Wrong fleet?
I am very curious as to what your evidence for backing up this proposition is or would be.
Okay, this is weird, but the first thing that popped into my head when you mentioned that there were images that used to be from this article was an image of a pony, vaguely Pinkie Pie looking. (being aware of cognition is weird)
I don't even watch My Little Pony or participate in its community. Now I'm starting to wonder if it has evolved into some sort of toxic meme which is replacing itself into generic forms of things.
A community blog with the purpose of refining the practice of rational behavior?
Eliminates human bias, doesn't imply that rationality is an 'art', and proclaims itself teleologically rather than ontologically.
I think I am currently in this state. (The inducing factor was probably going to a science fiction convention; I'm not sure why this is weirdly inspirational.) Does anybody have a roundup of appropriate posts somewhere?
Can you imagine Harry killing Hermione because Voldemort threatened to plague all sentient life with one barely noticed dust speck each day for the rest of time? Can you imagine killing your own best friend/significant other/loved one to stop the powers of the Matrix from hitting 3^^^3 sentient beings with nearly inconsquential dust specks? Of course not. No. Snap decision.
My breaking point would be about 10 septillion people, which is far, far less... no, wait, that's for a single-event dust speck.
What's your definition of all sentient life? Are we talking Earth, observable universe, or what? What's 'the rest of time'?
3^^^3 is so large that claims on this order of magnitude are hard to judge. See Pascal's Muggle for a discussion of this.
A list of outcomes possible in the future (in order of my preference):
- We create AI which corresponds to my values.
- Life on Earth persists under my value set.
- Life on Earth is totally exterminated.
- Life on Earth persists under its current value set.
- We create an AI which does not correspond to my values.
If LW is not trying to eradicate the scourge of transphobia, than clearly SIAI has moved from 1 to 5, and I should be trying to dismantle it, rather than fund it.
He could instead mean something closer to "AI risk seems to be an important contribution for charitable dollars, but the SIAI's lack of careful control and moderation of their own fora even given its potential PR risk makes me question whether they are competent enough or organized enough to substantially help deal with AI risk."
That is indeed my concern. If CFAR can't avoid a Jerry Sandusky/Joe Paterno type scenario (which I am reasonably probable it is capable of, given one of its founders wrote HPMOR), then it is literally a horrendous joke and I should be allocating my contributions to somewhere more productive.
The link JoachimSchipper refers to shows gwern being pretty clearly evil.
[Tue Nov 6 2012]
ivan: Someone just told me... "well... having their food labeled as GMO makes them uncomfortable like having sex with a trans person"
>.< [18:10]
whaaat?
That seems pretty plausible.
Not particularly backed intuitive dislike.
I mean, conditional on uncomfortability of both.
Algo: makes sense. both are unnatural and deceptive
gwern: Both are? [18:13]
Algo: yeah, one is a monstrous abortion pretending to be its opposite and deluding the eye thanks to the latest scientific techniques, and the other is a weird fruit
gwern, "deceptive" is a pretty terrible word to use for trans people.
gwern, what a disgusting thing to say. [18:14]
startling: more or less disgusting than a GMO fruit rotting for a week?
inquiring minds need to know!
And it wasn't even an isolated incident:
also all of my anger toward drethelin is completely gone [20:54]
gwern, so it is like do notation!
as well as toward everyone else
Grognor: what, because you got a free book?
no.
you had your 'nads surgically removed?
yes, that's exactly what happened. [20:55]
electroshock therapy? * nshepperd (~asdfg@70.218.233.220.static.exetel.com.au) has quit: Ping timeout: 276 seconds [20:56]
startling: maybe he started estrogen supplementation
gwern, okay?
startling: we won't judge him for it. well, maybe you won't, I find trannies really creepy
There wasn't even the possibility that it was some bizarre form of "off-color humor". Gwern admitted it himself:
I realize that, which is why I avoid anything to do with transexuals on LW: I won't defend my feelings since I know perfectly well that objectively there is no reason to dislike such people, but my feelings exist anyway and mean that anything I might write on the topic is fruit of a poisoned tree.
IRC, on the other hand, is ephemeral and officially not publicly logged so I don't put as much of a filter on my stream of consciousness.
How is gwern still allowed on this site without making a significant apology and reparations? It is making me seriously reconsider any funding that I would give to CFAR or SIAI.
Boltzmann brain scenarios will occur regardless of any given doomsday.
Am I the only person who answered "100" on the cryonics question because "revived at some point in the future" was indefinite enough that a Boltzmann brain-like scenario inevitably occurring eventually seemed reasonable?
Also, I did all the extra credit questions. At twos in the morning.
I will examine 30 questions. dallasjhaugh at gmail dot com
I somehow really thought this article was going to be about upscaled Rock 'Em Sock 'Em Robots. I'm not sure if this is better or worse.
What cartoon was this?
Go with Biology.
Where do you currently live?
In a void where there are just these particular Nazis and Jews, sure, but in most contexts, you'll have a variety of intelligences with varying utility functions, and those with pro-arbitrary-genocide values are dangerous to have around.
Of course, there is the simple alternative of putting the Nazis in an enclosed environment where they believe that Jews don't exist. Hypotheticals have to be really strongly defined in order to avoid lateral thinking solutions.
If the Nazis have some built-in value that determines that they hate something utterly arbitrary, then why don't we exterminate them?
This might actually be true. If you consider the categories of white people who would be most likely to have black people in their social network, what comes up is a list of categories correlated with racism (e.g. poverty, religiosity).
Somebody is raising money for buying Wardenclyffe Tower and turning it into a museum. Is this worth the dead kids or should we try and intervene?
I think there is a vague consensus that, all other things equal, eating less will make you lose weight and eating more will make you gain weight? I might have seen someone post a counterexample at least once, but I might simply be misremembering.
Yudkowsky's been downvoted before; the most notable time in recent memory was probably removing the link to the NY Observer article.
Our local surroundings could be made into a dense volume of self-replicating computronium hosting as many bare-minimum sapients as possible, but only a few people here would argue that it's morally imperative to carry that out to full term.
Another difference is that the mature sapient has typically specified, or would specify, that it should be reinstated in advance, and works within the framework of society. If the baby survives any sort of abuse it undergoes until it is sapient, then it might be entitled to some damages, but until then, it lacks self-ownership and is susceptible to destruction by its possessors.
Infants and fetuses are not sapient. Arbitrarily privileging biological life regardless of its mental capability would set a horrible precedent. Note that there isn't that coherent of a line between more intelligent mammals and human babies.
What counts as a "conversion"? I was baptized Catholic, but my family was otherwise extremely lapsed. I don't think I really believed in anything that strongly before briefly dabbling in various esoteric practices. JREF and Gödel, Escher, Bach convinced me otherwise.
It might get a bit suspicious if you are entirely asking people about what other people think. You'd have to mix it with more conventional "dummy" questions.
Assuming, of course, that this hypothesis is true. The great thing is that it's easily testable.
- The art form must be linear and intend to proceed without interaction from the user.
- The length of the three "notes" must be in 8:8:15 ratio (in that order).
- The main distinguishing factor between "notes", must be in 2:3:4 ratio (in that order).
- The motif must be the overwhelmingly dominant "voice" when it occurs.
An alien civilization within the boundaries of the current observable universe has, or will have within the next 10 billion years, created a work of art which includes something directly analogous to the structure of the "dawn motif" from the beginning of Richard Strauss's Also sprach Zarathustra. (~90%)
I wasn't actually sure what people believed about this, so I was very curious to see how this would be received. So can we say the word "cult" now?
The use of the term "phyg" rather than "cult" when engaging in cult-related metadiscussions just makes LW look more cultish to outsiders. (~80%)
So, why are you wasting your time trying to evangelize, doing everything short of actually calling us Nazis, without direct physical evidence when you could be spitting on those awful 8-year-old whores walking to school or sucking an infant's dick?
The utility you generate by doing this is probably cancelled out by the fact, that as a direct consequence, I have inscribed the word יהוה onto a sheet of paper twice for each and every hyphen in your article, followed by reciting it, because it is really goddamn annoying. Stop apologizing for your utterly and irredeemably evil moral system.
Wait, isn't this almost exactly the beginning of Greg Egan's novel Zendegi, at about approximately the same time?
Assuming you survive for more than the next ten years or so, yes.
Also, your wife is Catholic. If you issue an ultimatum to deconvert, we end up with one of the three following scenarios:
- She accepts.
- You divorce her. She doesn't remarry, probably causing her vast emotional harm.
- You divorce her. She caves in to emotional pressure and remarries, ousting her from the conventional Catholic community.
All three scenarios weaken overall religious influence and raise the probability that your children will be epistemologically sane. I consider this preferable.
Divide the groups in two based on familial affiliation (they'll expect that).
Ask the following questions:
- My radius of "personal space" is... (tiny/small/medium/large/immense)
- I am... (short/somewhat short/average/somewhat tall/tall)
Bias x by (1) [near aisle should be "tiny"] and y by (2) [back should be "tall"]. Average groups, ignore children.
One example: I have had to deal with people going on and on with "but it's not really you!" arguments about mind uploading on other forums on several separate occasions. Of course it's annoying to press on about it entirely by yourself, so I don't really bother and move on after a post or two. Here, I don't have to repeat myself over and over very often, and the userbase is sympathetic, so keeping systemic obnoxiousness out of the environment is feasible enough that we should crush it with overwhelming force.
If it's a troll, I'd guess either Eliezer being meta or maybe Mitchell Porter trying to make a point, but I've seen people this oblivious before.
If you posted something not obnoxious, I'm inclined to believe the community would, in fact, upvote it.
You are self-identifying as a 9/11 "truther", which is signalling to us that you are a crank with a persecution complex. The fact that you subsequently verified delusions of persecution is just digging yourself into a deeper hole.