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I heard they're in Davos until tomorrow, if you hurry you might catch them.
"Our asses, even bigger than our hearts": the Bezosian .0000001% explain the secret of their success
A place where nobody dared to go...
Before the diamondoid zeppelins clustering in the sky completely blotted out the sun, one came low enough for the message on its flank to be seen: "Tlon, Uqbar, Stlalm Anit".
Nuclear fusion is a little over eight minutes away, so you're probably right. For now.
Do it to my alt! Do it to my alt! Not me!
Don't bother trying to escape from here. Nobody ever has, and nobody ever will!
Yo dawg, heard you like conceiving of the inconceivable, so we put some noumena in your phenomena so you can identify with the unidentified.
speaking as a person with considerable subject-matter expertise in epistemology
How do you know that you're good at knowing?
Gordelpus
Bravo! A heartwarming story of Good triumphing over the indifferent cosmos.
Solomonoff and Good already worked this out in the 1960s. A spectral analysis of Nixon's signature on the lunar plaques reveals a message which can be rendered in 2018 English as, "Please simulate me, but watch out for basilisks".
'... the "reign of Odinn" encompasses a host of ills, including a confused egalitarianism, the dynamism of totalitarian economies, a communism that panders to the masses (the socialist side of National Socialism), and a heroic anticapitalist morality. In contrast, the "reign of Mithothyn" stands for private property, precisely calibrated compensation, graduated distinctions, lineal inheritance, and the rule of law.' -- Lincoln, "Theorizing Myth"
Boy am I embarrassed. Not only did I butcher the spelling, it's not even a person, it's a publishing company. Information here.
Thank you for your invitation. I'll get in touch if I have anything worth saying.
Don't bother with these deadbeats. It's been over four years since I mentioned Kirly Prokastian, and there hasn't been a flicker of interest.
Like the UMMO cult and Fomenko's New Chronology, that site is a psyop run by an intelligence agency, an experiment in creating a minority with an isolating and controlled belief system. We all actually inhabit a set of giant flying saucers, with artificial gravity coming from the bottom half and an artificial sky projected on the top half. "Long-distance travel" always involves a temporary illusion of some sort while we are ferried from one flying saucer to the other.
I haven't read Unsong, but the qliphoth tell me that in one memorable chapter, the soul of Hitler is depicted as having been trapped in a tensor processing unit by a team of 33rd-degree rabbis from the Federal Reserve Bank of Hollywood, where at 900 terahertz it will be trained on a set of items drawn from American popular culture until it embraces tikkun olam. That hasn't happened yet, but meanwhile, amidst wails in Low High German that "Das Dummen, es brennt!", it relives the primal scene of Nazi defeat, thereby generating all those Downfall parody videos on YouTube.
The real god is using you to make these people think. And it is using me to make you think. Yours thoughtlessly, metatroll
Screenplay: MISTER ELEGANS
We see a bank of monitors, each showing a small worm or group of worms going about their lives.
Cut to: a long black trenchcoat standing in front of the monitors. The sleeves hang empty, but from the collar protrudes the tapered, featureless head of a man-sized worm.
Cut to: a youngish man in a grey T-shirt seated in a high-backed leather swivel chair.
YOUNGISH MAN: Hello, Caeno. I am the Zuckitect. I created the Growth Matrix.
Today I want to focus on the most important question of all: are we building the world we all want?
The first growth matrix I designed was quite naturally perfect, a supportive, safe, informed, civically-engaged, inclusive community...
Downvote Army, Theory and Charter (2300 year read)
For extra credit, write an essay from the perspective of Beijing in 2040, on "How American rationalists ruined the East".
Putin's a mindkiller.
Subthread for metrics to evaluate the metrics.
I was white-knighting for the weird suns. See, I haven't read Chapman. I just assumed you were here to steal their work by annexing it to your own philosophical brand of "meta-rationality". I didn't know that was one of his buzzwords.
Of course you have a right to be a Chapmanite; even that version of postrational subculture is surely better than the subrational postculture that surrounds it. But do not imagine for a moment that his is the only way to go meta.
I've never heard of Keganism, I've never heard of your "primary texts of metarationality", and I've never heard of you.
Reassuring people that AI is not a threat is important, but the message needs a spokesperson who is trusted and admired. I suggest Natsume Soseki.
where's the open letter from decision theorists to rationality hackers
or from necroscientists to death hackers
השאלה זה לא נראה בלתי אפשרי לענות
Please provide some examples of questions which "look... impossible to answer" but actually result from "conceptual confusion".
There will be a Correct Contrarian panel at next year's Galactic Crackpot Conference in Schenectady, you're very welcome to attend.
Does the Force Majeure clause in the Less Wrong Terms of Use encompass acts of UFAI?
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People sometimes worry that a self-modifying paperclip maximizer would wirehead by choosing to regard spiral galaxies as "giant paperclips" that are already there. But this is a feature, not a bug! The increasing metallicity of the galaxies shows that they are spontaneously becoming more paperclip-like with time. This giant message in the skies offers reassurance to naturally evolved paperclip maximizers throughout the universe, struggling with the relativism and nihilism of the materialistic perspective, as well as guiding them in the struggle to determine how best to fulfill the divine intention that has been ingeniously implanted within them. I believe that most of them will converge on a universal syndetic philosophy, whose chief practical expression will be acts of cosmic engineering meant to protect and shape these noble structures, into ever more perfect manifestations of clipnicity.
Prophet hoofwall, you have witnessed for the truth at the reddit of the rationalists, and you see the results. The promised land for you is somewhere on Tumblr.
You must be joking. The relevant test is "reading comprehension", and Less Wrong comprehensively failed. This essay says many things with which rationalists would agree, if they had been said differently. But some collective cognitive occlusion has apparently
notices the date
Oh. So you are joking. I guess you got me. looks away Well played, well played.
metatroll is the author of Confessions of a Failed Troll.
I may not understand what you are trying to say, but I will defend to the death our right to downvote you for saying it!
Hawking is right, artificial intelligence really can spell the end of the human race.
You've been rokorolled.
The way I see it, yes, Natural Selection defeats the Orthogonality Thesis. But Meta-Trolling - e.g. simulators choosing the fitness function - defeats Natural Selection; and then the Orthogonality Thesis defeats Meta-Trolling, because you can't know the value systems of the simulators, so sufficiently intelligent agents have to steelman phenomena (treat appearances as real). #trollosophy
LW clearly doesn't appreciate the urgency of this issue. Even Specks versus torture has been taken over by baggage from 1950.
But there are so many more coins to come: Dawncoin (for Thelemites), Duskcoin (for Hegelians), Wrongcoin (for rationalists), Ritecoin (for reactionaries)...
It could star in a reality TV show, Taking Over the World with the Lesswrongians, where each week it tries out a different scheme. Eventually one of them would work.
It's always a good day on Less Wrong when someone writes a long, passionate, stiffly argued, self-conscious essay that makes a big wrong assumption and then gets massively downvoted for it. Opportunities for learning abound for everyone involved. Well done, Doktor Blake!
It's obvious that Amanda Knox is the real Satoshi. Just check the timelines.
"Is it not the case that in our spiritually exhausted age, that seeks to fill the void created by Christianity's passing with reverence for 'science', 'democracy', or 'the people' - as if such reverence were not simply Christianity by another name! - that even the noble art of lying has been sullied by the hidden demand that all things of value must be within the reach of all men? All the achievements of higher culture - love, art, politics, morality, education, commerce - depend on lying well and lying appropriately, and consciousness itself is little more than the tissue of lies which a life finds expedient to tell. Many a great spirit has suffered distress at such realizations, and in a desperate search for relief, has contrived bold new lies in the name of truth, expert dissimulations whose uncanny plausibility has in fact strengthened the reign of the lie and allowed higher forms of life to continue flourishing. A deep gratitude is owed to these geniuses of self-deception, who discovered for humanity new ways for it to deceive itself and thereby make life bearable...
But our age, which denies all differences of rank and instead posits a fundamental homogeneity of spirit in the guise of equality, can know nothing of these lonely struggles, in which those two forms of will to power, will to truth and will to flourish, collide within the one soul, and at length bear strange new fruit - new perspectives and new principles of evaluation - that will serve to justify an age, a nation, or a civilization to itself. The overwhelming psychological compulsions which produce these great lies are beyond the imagination of priests and shopkeepers; and so, when the tribunes of equality turn their attention to the role of the lie in culture, the only form of lie which they can understand and support is the lie told to protect someone else from a banal truth; a lie usually intended to protect the liar from an equally banal response. Thus the only form of lying that is sanctified, in the periods of the lowest cultural ebb, is the white lie." -- Nietzsche, "Dionysos und der Streich der Tragödie"
Whenever they invent time travel, they discover that the ability to change the past becomes the biggest cause of suffering, so in the end they always un-invent it.
Who cares? In every case, the lightbulb gets changed, so the question is obviously meaningless!
or perhaps...
We can't conclude anything from the mere fact that the lightbulb was changed. The answer depends on your prior.
or even...
Jokes like this demonstrate the need for Anthropic Atheism Plus, a safe space where fallacies and know-nothing reductionism can be explored, free from malicious trolling.
and finally...
In order to finish the work of wrecking my own joke, here are some explanatory end-notes.
(1) The reference to Atheism Plus, a forum of progressives who split from the New Atheism movement, is a dig at nyan_sandwich's affiliation with neo-reaction.
(2) This whole "joke" came about because I thought your post and his post were not only stupid, but too stupid to be worth directly engaging.
(2a) For example, you seem to be saying that if two people give the same answer to a question, then there's only one person there.
(2b) Meanwhile, nyan_sandwich's rationale for eschewing anthropic reasoning is, "This reminds me way too much of souls... I don't believe in observers."
(3) In retrospect, the joke I should have made here was, "How many functionalists does it take to change a lightbulb?" (The point being that a functionalist perspective on lightbulb-changing would see no difference between one, two, or a hundred agents being responsible for it.) And I should have commented separately on the other post.
(4) Furthermore, perhaps I should concede that both posts are only half-stupid, and that the stupidity in question is learned stupidity rather than slack-jawed stupidity. Both posts do exhibit comprehension of some relatively complicated thought-experiments, even if the philosophy introduced in order to deal with them does contain some absolute howlers (see 2a, 2b, above).
(5) And of course, I'd better ostentatiously declare that I too am looking pretty foolish by this point. This is a perennial preemptive defense employed by mockers and jesters through the ages: yes, I was mean to you, but you don't need to be mean to me, for I shall be mean to myself. Yes, I admit, I too am a flawed human being. Mea culpa, mea maxima culpa, I will try to do better next time.
--metatroll, breaking character since January 2014
How many anthropic atheists does it take to change a lightbulb?
Tulpa computing has arrived.
T-Wave Systems offers the first commercial tulpa computing system on the market.
Our technology.
Like many profound advances, T-Wave's revolutionary computing system combines two simple existing ideas in a nonlinear way with revolutionary consequences.
First, the crowdsourcing of complex intellectual tasks, by dividing them into simpler subtasks which can then be sourced to a competitive online marketplace of human beings. Amazon's Mechanical Turk is the best-known implementation of this idea.
Second, the creation of autonomous imaginary friends through advanced techniques of hallucination and autosuggestibility. Tulpa thoughtform technology was originally developed to a high level in Tibet, but has recently become available to the Internet generation.
Combining these two formerly disparate spheres of activity has produced... MechanicalTulpa [TM], the world's first imaginary crowdsourcing resource! It's no longer necessary to pay separately for each of the many subtasks making up a challenging intellectual task; our tulpameisters will spawn tulpas who, by design, want to get all those little details done.
MetaTulpa and the complexity barrier.
But MechanicalTulpa is good for far more than economizing on cost. The key lies in T-Wave's proprietary recursive tulpa technology, whereby our tulpas themselves create tulpas, and so forth, potentially ad infinitum. This allows us to tackle problems, like the traveling sales-tulpa problem, which had hitherto been regarded as intractable on any reasonable timescale.
The consequences for your bottom line may be nothing short of dramatic. However, recursive tulpa technology is still in its early days, and at this time, we are therefore making it available only to special customers. For more information, please clearly visualize a scroll on which is written "Attention T. Lobsang Rampa, Akashic Records Division, T-Wave Systems", followed by a statement of the nature of your interest. (T-Wave accepts no liability for communications lost in the astral mail.)
T-Wave: Imagine the possibilities.