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Re-reading the grand-grand-grand-grand-parent post, yes, I now see that you're correct that that was what he was trying to get at - although he certainly wasn't being particularly clear.
But regardless, downvoting someone for conceding a point to someone they're engaged in debate with is pretty lame.
If anything, I'd be tempted to say that autism is a more pronounced degree of asperger's
That seems to me to be basically equivalent to saying that aspergers is a lesser form of autism. Again, sorry I can't find the links at the moment, but I recall reading several articles suggesting that the two might actually not be related at all, neurologically.
The whole idea of neurodiversity is kind of exciting, actually. If there can be more than one way to appropriately interact with society, everyone gets richer.
I agree. Unfortunately, modern culture and institutions (like the public education system for one notable example) don't seem to be set up based on this premise.
I have a form of autism called Asperger Syndrome
This is not at all unusual here at LessWrong... I can't seem to find a link, but I seem to recall that a fairly large portion of LessWrong-ers (at least relative to the general population) have Aspergers (or at least are somewhat Asperger-ish), myself included.
I'm not entirely sure though that I agree with the statement that Aspergers is "a form of autism"... I realize that that has been the general consensus for a while now, but I've read some articles (again, can't find a link at the moment, sorry) suggesting that Aspergers is not actually related to Autism at all... personally, my feeling on the matter is that "Aspergers" isn't an actual "disease" per se, but rather just a cluster of personality traits that happen to be considered socially unacceptable by modern mainstream culture, and have therefore been arbitrarily designated as a "disease".
In any case, welcome to LessWrong - I look forward to your contributions in the future!
By "the first one" do you mean "AND THEREFORE, REPUBLICANS ARE RIGHT!"? If so, please cite examples.
probably in one episode of The Konkvistador And Multiheaded Show
I've been abstaining from LessWrong for awhile now, so I've missed a lot. Can you link me to some examples of what you mean by "The Konkvistador And Multiheaded Show"? It sounds highly entertaining.
Yes, I suppose so. Good point.
Edit: Seriously? Downvotes? For conceding that my political opponent made a good point? Seriously?
Although I disagree with FiftyTwo's conclusions, I am nevertheless disappointed that it has received net downvotes.... it's a perfectly valid question after all, and we're not supposed to be doing downvote==disagree, right?
For fairness' and balance's sake, I'll say that the pro-choice is probably less about integrity of body and more about wanting to fuck without consequence.
Funny, from my point of view this evidence suggests that pro-lifers are actually more concerned with controlling women's sex lives, than with saving unborn babies.
Upvoted, beacause I agree in principle, but I don't actually see any examples of this in this thread.
If you put a big banner over a discussion saying "HEY THIS IS A POLITICAL DISCUSSION", and you have people adding "AND THEREFORE, REPUBLICANS ARE RIGHT!" at the end of their posts, or reply with "OH, THAT'S A SOCIALIST ARGUMENT YOU'RE MAKING THERE"
I don't see any examples of people actually doing that, though.
If they laugh, that proves I'm right; if they boo, that proves I'm right.
This seems like heresy to me from a Bayesian perspective.
calling upon various fictional deities for whom I have great respect.
Just curious... can you clarify this statement? It sounds a lot like Chaos Magick to me, and that surprises me, coming from you (not necessarily in a bad way).
The entertaining thing from my perspective is that the discussions here have been polite, informative, and honest
Yes, I've noticed that too, which was part of why I was confused that people objected to it.
I was under the impression that this was an "official" thing, but it sounds like I was wrong.
Just curious... who is downvoting this post, and why? Politics is the mind killer, I know... but this regularly-occuring thread is supposed to be an accepted exception, isn't it?
There is no clear bright line determining who is or is not a fundamentalist Christian. Right now, there pretty much is a clear bright line determining who is or is not human.
Is there? What about unborn babies? What about IVF fetuses? People in comas? Cryo-presevered bodies? Sufficiently-detailed brain scans?
delta-wave-inducing binaural beats
Do you have any recommendations for a currently commercially available (or freely available) source of binaural beats? I experimented with a binaural beat "mind machine" years ago, and saw no significant results, but still find the idea fascinating.
Eliezer found your comment, read it, decided he wanted to get rid of it
Circumstantial evidence suggests that it was not Eliezer himself who personally modded the thread. But I'm not sure.
This does not sound much more plausible than him noticing that your thread broke the rules, and censoring it for that reason, at about the same time your accused him of dishonesty in it.
Sure, that's a possability. It seems to me much less likely than my proposed hypothesis, but only the mods can say for sure. Mods? Comment?
Given that evidence, it would be absolutely shocking if he did not censor your post once it was pointed out that you broke the advocating violence rule, whether or not you accused him of dishonesty.
Well, this post is still up, despite discussing violence.
Yes, but I can only see my side of them, not the comments they were responding to, and they don't make any sense that way.
A better way to present the data would be to have a column for your actions, and then a second column giving the amount of time between that action and the deletion.
Agreed. That was my original intention, but I didn't realize that deletion of the thread would eliminate the entire record of the sequence of events. I'm sure such a highly-granular log could be produced by the mods though. Mods? You reading this? (rhetorical question... we all know you are).
You obviously think it is much more likely that the mods will act immediately than that they will act with a one-day lag, but I don't buy this, especially considering the fact that the one day during which the post wasn't deleted was Christmas.
I was watching the "recent comments" while all this was ongoing, and I assure you that EY, and other prominent mods, were active on the site at the time. Also, not of demographics which typically celebrate christmas (not that there's anything wrong with that).
Downvoted for bragging about trolling here - that's not something I want to see encouraged.
I was quite concerned about this myself, which is why I very intentionally created a separate troll thread (or "experimental thread") within which to segregate my trolling from the main discussion thread, in order to avoid lowering the signal-to-noise ratio in the forum where substantive matters were being discussed.
By the time I entered phase 3 of the experiment (explicit trolling), the post had already been downvoted sufficiently that it was no longer appearing on "recent comments".
Trust me, I put a LOT of thought into this.
even though this particular experiment was not helpful
Not helpful? How do you figure? From where I stand, we won't be able to draw any conclusions about that until several days from now, after seeing how things play out.
your method may have caused collateral damage,
Elaborate, please.
and your conclusion was poorly supported. On the other hand, you had a chart that presented a poorly-supported hypothesis as fact.
How do you mean? Obviously it wasn't a rigorously controlled experiment, up to acedemic standards - it wasn't supposed to be. But I'm not aware of any obvious flaws. As stated elsewhere in the thread:
the "troll thread" had been pretty much dead for about 12 hours or so when the "dishonesty" comment got posted... and 60 seconds later resulted in deletion ... the unlikelihood of that being coincidental seems astronomical.
Or are you referring to something else? Please elaborate.
Your dishonesty was the last straw.
I've never been more honest in my life. What do you mean?
Your argument would seem to recommend a hands-off policy to moderation - in fact this is very the basis on which websites with full-time legal staff recommend such policies.
If you censor (i.e. "exercise editorial control over") posts which you disapprove of, the inescapable implication is that you DO approve of all OTHER posts. Whereas if you instead institute a policy of not exercising editorial control of your comments (except as mandated by law), then you escape that implication, by saying "we don't exercise editorial control over our comments, therefore lack of censorship cannot logically be read to imply endorsement".
That's pretty quick reactions if it's really about the accusation of dishonesty.
As pointed out elsewhere in this thread, the "troll thread" had been pretty much dead for about 12 hours or so when the "dishonesty" comment got posted... and 60 seconds later resulted in deletion. I'm a bit too intoxicated at the moment to do the math, but the unlikelihood of that being coincidental seems astronomical.
Furthermore, the accusation is much more noticeable in this thread than it was in your previous
Yes, but in this thread, unlike the other, I've been very careful not to violate any deletion policies/social norms, thereby denying Eliezer/the Mods any convenient excuse for deletion.
The only problem I can think of with this experiment is that your post could have been deleted for one of your more overt offenses, but it took until the time it was actually deleted for someone to actually get around to deleting it, especially with all the controversy. You have evidence that it was attacking Eliezer that broke the camel's back, but maybe not strong evidence.
Good point, but the timing of how exactly things went down argues pretty strongly for my interpretation: all of the explicit violations happened on christmas eve, within a period of a few hours. Then I was gone most of the next day for christmas with the family, during which time there was pretty much no action on the thread. When I posted the final comment, it was basically the only thing posted to the thread that day, and the banhammer came down literally within 60 seconds.
What you should have done is post several different posts each violating one of the above rules and wait for something to happen, then post your concussions in a day or two. (sigh) I guess it's too late for that now.
Yeah, probably... but I had last minute christmas shopping to do!
Yes, that was covered by the previous question: "Under what jurisdiction?"
It's also a form of dishonesty to request public feedback on a policy issue, then systematically ignore all feedback that disagrees with your predetermined decision.
You certainly raise some valid points. I'll discuss them with you some more tomorrow.....
I mean... assuming that that's still allowed.
Well, you are correct that the post isn't actually about retributive justice........ but it's not about sovereignty either ;)
This concludes the exhaustive explanation of why you were downvoted.
I didn't ask why the post was downvoted. I didn't have to. It was by design.
I feel that much of the planned impact of this post rests on challenging implicit assumption of political leaning: Holocaust bad, America good.
Your assumptions are incorrect. The planned impact of the post rested rather on the implicit assumptions that Censorship bad, Open Debate good.
Please review this post, and its comments, for the backstory. If you're still not clear on what's going on here, you should probably PM me so I don't have to spoil the joke any further here on the thread.
Yes, that would seem to be the obvious answer. But the obvious answer isn't necessarily the correct answer, so it seems like something at least worth discussing openly, doesn't it?
Fundamental civil liberties is also a fundamentally diseased concept.
Please explain. (I've heard this argued before, but I'm curious what your particular angle on it is)
I don't think this censorship decision has a very meaningful impact either way on FAI.
I disagree. One of the most common objections to the idea of FAI/CEV is "so will this new god-like AI restrict fundamental civil liberties after it takes over?"
you have to realize the risks are far more on Eliezer than they are on any poster
This, I think, is the fundamental point of diagreement here. The emotional valence is far greater on Eliezer than on us, but if we're taking seriously the proposition that the singularity is coming in our lifetimes (and I do), then the risks are the same for all of us.
His low tolerance responses and angry swearing are exactly what you should expect
Angry swearing? Did I miss some posts? Link please.
This is also why trying to point out his Okcupid profile as a PR snafu is a non sequitur.
I suppose I should point out that when I referred earlier to Eliezer's occasional lapses in judgement, I was absolutely NOT intending to refer to this. I wasn't actively commenting at the time, but looking back on that episode, I found a lot of the criticism of Eliezer regarding his OKcupid profile to be downright offensive. When I first read the profile, I was actually incredibly impressed by the courage he displayed in not hiding anything about who he is.
OK. This is a question about what you would do if you were a transhuman FAI (or designing one).
This is a question about Ethics. Ethics are off topic for LW?
Eugine's comment is currently at zero, despite my upvote. So someone must have downvoted it.
Why? I thought it was an extremely substantive contribution to the discussion. Do you not think we should be having this discussion at all?
Why not, specifically?
Even on Reddit, a question of this nature would not be censored.
Aren't we supposed to be better than Reddit?
Off the top of my head, my response would be that for private prosecution to be ethically legitimate, it should require a victim in the jurisdiction in question. Was there a Canadian victim in that case? (Not a rhetorical question, I honestly don't know).
Eliezer, do you consider this a valid question to be discussed on LW?
This is certainly a valid question, worthy of further debate.
Eliezer, do you disagree?
I don't dispute that. I consider it proof that trolling is not always without value.
One man's modus ponens is another man's modus tollens.
BTW, I know it's not terribly rare for anti-marijuana laws to be enforced against middle-class people where I am; so he should have either specified “against middle-class people in Northern California”
Also, even in California, and even for people of middle class, you'll get marijuana laws enforced against you if you manage to piss off the wrong cop/prosecutor.
Before I spend any more time replying to this, can you clarify for me... do you and I actually disagree about something of substance here? I.e. how an organization should, in the real world, deal with PR concerns? Or are we just arguing about the most technically correct way to go about stating our position?
You seem to be using a very narrow definition of "crypto".. I'm not sure whether you're just being pedantic about definitions, in which case you may be correct, or if you're actually disputing the substance of what I'm saying. To answer your question, I'm not a cryptographer, but I have a CS degree and am quite capable of reading and understanding crypto papers (though not of retaining the knowledge for long)... it's been several years since I read the relevant papers, so I might be getting some of the details wrong in how I'm explaining it, but the basic concept of deniable message authentication is something that's well understood by mainstream cryptographers.
You seem to be aware of the existence of OTR, so I'm confused - are you claiming that it doesn't accomplish what it says it does? Or just that something about the way I'm proposing to apply similar technology to this use case would break some of its assumptions? The latter case is entirely possible, as so far I've put a grand total of about 5 minutes thought into it... if that's the case I'd be curious to know what are the relevant assumptions my proposed use case would break?
As much as people who don't like this policy, might wish that it were impossible for anyone to tell the difference so that they could thereby argue against the policy, it's not actually very hard to tell the difference.
I didn't interpret CronoDAS's post as intending to actually advocate violence. I viewed it as really silly and kind of dickish, and a good thing that he ultimately removed it, but an actual call to violence? No. It was a thought experiment. His thought experiment was set in the present day, while yours was set in the far future, but other than that I don't see a bright line separating them.
It may not be be very hard for you to tell the difference, since you wrote the policy, so you may very well have a clear bright line separating the two in your head, but we don't.
I am asking in advance if anyone has non-obvious consequences they want to point out or policy considerations they would like to raise. In other words, the form of this discussion is not 'Do you like this?' - you probably have a different cost function from people who are held responsible for how LW looks as a whole - but rather, 'Are there any predictable consequences we didn't think of that you would like to point out
Eliezer, at this point I think it's fair to ask: has anything anyone has said so far caused you to update? If not, why not?
I realize some of my replies to you in this thread have been rather harsh, so perhaps I should take this opportunity to clarify: I consider myself a big fan of yours. I think you're a brilliant guy, and I agree with you on just about everything regarding FAI, x-risk, SIAI's mission.... I think you're probably mankind's best bet if we want to successfully navigate the singularity. But at the same time, I also think you can demonstrate some remarkably poor judgement from time to time... hey, we're all running on corrupted hardware after all. It's the combination of these two facts that really bothers me.
I don't know of any way to say this that isn't going to come off sounding horribly condescending, so I'm just going to say it, and hope you evaluate it in the context of the fact that I'm a big fan of your work, and in the grand scheme of things, we're on the same side.
I think what's going on here is that your feelings have gotten hurt by various people misattributing various positions to you that you don't actually hold. That's totally understandable. But I think you're confusing the extent to which your feelings have been hurt with the extent to which actual harm has been done to SIAI's mission, and are overreacting as a result. I'm not a psychologist - this is just armchair speculation.... I'm just telling you how it looks from the outside.
Again, we're all running on corrupted hardware, so it's entirely natural for even the best amongst us to make these kinds of mistakes... I don't expect you to be an emotionless Straw Vulcan (and indeed, I wouldn't trust you if you were)... but your apparent unwillingness to update in response to other's input when it comes to certain emotionally charged issues is very troubling to me.
So to answer your question "Are there any predictable consequences we didn't think of that you would like to point out"... well I've pointed out many already, but the most concise, and most important predictable consequence of this policy which I believe you're failing to take into account, is this: IT LOOKS HORRIBLE... like, really really bad. Way worse than the things it's intended to combat.
Well, point 3 can be eliminated by proper use of crypto. See OTR
The response to point 2 is that by having it be publicly known to everyone that messages' contents are formally mathematically provably deniable (as can be guaranteed by proper crypto implementation), that disincentivizes people from even bothering to re-post content in the first place.
Point 1, however, I agree with completely, and that's why I'm not actually advocating this solution.
One the one hand, you're deciding policy based on non-PR related factors, then thinking about the most PR friendly way to proceed from there. On the other hand, you're letting PR actually determine policy.