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Why does it sound more like 1 than .5? If I believed the probability of my home getting struck by a meteorite was as high as .5, I would definitely make preparations.
That sounds like someone who rationalizes, which is something we should be avoiding.
It's weird that trying to rationalize something can go against rationality, but that's English for you.
Edit: I assume this was downvoted so heavily because I failed do the constructive thing by providing a suggestion of my own. Sorry about that.
How about something based on the name of the site? LWite, LWer, LWan? Or maybe a more pronounceable version like Lewite, etc.
I also think the farther into the future you get the less interested future people will be in reviving (by comparison) the mentally inferior.
This sounds possible but not at all obvious. It seems to me that so far, interest in historical people and compassion for the mentally inferior have if anything increased over time. This certainly doesn't mean they'll continue to do so out into the far future, but it does mean I'd need some really good reasons to support expecting them to.
Cost of facilities per person should go down significantly as the number of people gets large, right?
It's counterintuitive to say that being dead is basically null value. If I'm choosing between two courses of action, and one difference is that one of them will involve me dying, that's a strong factor in making me prefer the other option.
I can think of possible explanations for this that preserve the claim that being dead has value zero, but I'm not seeing a way that would do so only in non-cryonics cases.
Right. The whole point is that what karma really controls for is appearing useful to the community, not being useful to the community.
I agree that it has a purpose, and that we're better off with it. I don't think it's sufficient on its own, and we shouldn't fool ourselves into thinking that obsessing over it is the same as focusing on improving the community. At best, it improves only a small aspect of the community; at worst, the subgoal "think about karma and get points" takes over at the expense of all else.
But you wouldn't choose to die rather than walk through the city, would you?
It's hard for me to take the nightmare science fiction scenarios too seriously when the default actions comes with a well established, nonfictional nightmare: you don't sign up for cryonics, you die, and that's the end.
That's starting to sound like a general argument for shorter lifetimes over longer ones. Is there a reason this wouldn't apply just as well to living for five more years versus fifty? There's more room for extreme positive or negative experiences in the extra 45 years.
We are all attempting to make ourselves appear more useful to the community
That gets to the heart of why I don't think the karma system is worth too much emphasis. Shouldn't we instead be attempting to make ourselves more useful to the community?
Like so many things, it feels like it trivializes but it is there for a purpose.
That's true. I do think we're better off with it than we would be without it, but it shouldn't get attention disproportionate to its purpose. It's a means to an end, nothing more.
Describing this as being averse to risks doesn't make much sense to me. Couldn't a pro-cryonics person equally well justify her decision as being motivated by risk aversion? By choosing not to be preserved in the event of death, you risk missing out on futures that are worth living in. If you want to take this into bizarre and unlikely science fiction ideas, as with your dystopian cannon fodder speculation, you could easily construct nightmare scenarios where cryonics is the better choice. Simply declaring yourself to have "high risk aversion" doesn't really support one side over the other here.
This reminds me of a similar trope concerning wills: someone could avoid even thinking about setting up a will, because that would be "tempting fate," or take the opposite position: that not having a will is tempting fate, and makes it dramatically more likely that you'll get hit by a bus the next day. Of course, neither side there is very reasonable.
Does it have to be a dolphin, or would successful revival of a mouse count?
Try not to look up if that's been done before you answer. If you do know, try to imagine whether you'd count it as evidence, if you didn't already know.
Don't worry. I'd guess that posting this comment resulted in other people downvoting the article to compensate.
Which makes me think the karma limit on downvotes doesn't prevent downvotes (among high-karma members) so much as make them something that's done indirectly by posting a comment, rather than clicking "vote down."
That comment could equally well have gone in "The ideas you're not ready to post," come to think of it.
I like that motto a lot. Another one that bears on this is Postel's Law: "Be conservative in what you do; be liberal in what you accept from others."
In the case of wanting to deemphasize politeness, this would suggest being more lenient in the amount of rudeness you allow from others, but not increasing it in your output. Sort of the principle behind Crocker's Rules.
"Folks from the outside often see 'philosophy' as something without internal divisions (like people from the outside of any culture)."
Aren't those people just straightforwardly wrong? If anything, philosophy has too many internal divisions.
It may be that we'll hear more about that other project after the end of April.
Is there a way for us to see on our own how many downvotes and upvotes we've given?
I mean, I guess there is a way to check your total downvotes now, but I'd have to downvote a lot of posts to get the information that way.
I'm concerned that this makes the ability to downvote a limited resource. That's good in some ways, but as long as we're talking about "what if someone created a whole bunch of accounts to mess things up" scenarios, it raises an unpleasant possibility.
If someone mass-created accounts to post flame bait and complete garbage, we'd respond by voting them down severely, which restricts the ability to use downvotes productively in actual discourse.
I don't know much about the way this site is set up. Was that scenario already considered, but viewed as unlikely for reasons I'm not seeing?
Those of you excited about this: aside from the presumed difficulty of implementing it, would it be even better if there were an option to actually vote -0.3 on a post, instead of voting -1 with 30% probability? And would it be even more of an improvement if you could choose to vote anywhere in the [-1, 1] range, so that you could mark something -0.7 or +0.25?
Those suggestions probably seem like an exaggeration, but I really do think we're all getting too worked up over the minutia of the karma system. This isn't a game. These numbers aren't our high scores. It feels like there's too much temptation to regard them that way, and further complexity to the system will only increase that.
Marathons do involve a significant amount of pain/discomfort, but I wouldn't consider that to be the main motivation to them.
That does indeed help. Thank you.
So really, a meta strategy would be something like choosing your deck for a Magic tournament based on what types of decks you expect your opponents to use. While the non-meta strategy would be your efforts to win within a game once it's started.
I didn't vote the post in question up or down, but I would speculate that it was received negatively simply because the tone came across as rude.
There's sometimes a tendency in rationalists to observe (accurately) that our society overemphasizes politeness over frankness, and then to take it upon ourselves to correct this. Unfortunately, being human, we tend to do this selectively: by being ruder to others, sometimes to an overcompensating extent, while still reacting poorly to the rudeness of others. At least, that's an issue I've had in the past. Your mileage may vary.
My personal take on it is that keeping to the standard level of etiquette is less trouble than the alternative, especially when trying to function in a conversational setting with a wide range of people. The metaphor of apparently unnecessary politeness as a "social lubricant" of sorts has been helpful to me in this regard.
But as I said, I'm only guessing here. I think you'd be within your rights to simply stop caring about the votes you get, be they positive or negative. Just be aware that you may be giving up on useful feedback information that way.
Both those courses of action with dice sound like strategies to me, not meta strategies. Could you give another example of something you'd consider a meta strategy?
I think there's a larger point lurking here, which is that a good strategy should, in general, provide for gathering information so it can adapt. Do you agree?
Oddly enough, yes. "0 points" is also the standard. The singular only applies for 1.
That seems contradictory. If you actually thought that always using one strategy would have this obvious disadvantage over another course of action, then doing so would by definition not be "the strategy you currently think is best."
It sounds as though you're viewing the debate as a chance to test your own abilities at improvisational performance. That's the wrong goal. Your goal should be to win.
"The primary thing when you take a sword in your hands is your intention to cut the enemy, whatever the means. Whenever you parry, hit, spring, strike or touch the enemy’s cutting sword, you must cut the enemy in the same movement. It is essential to attain this. If you think only of hitting, springing, striking or touching the enemy, you will not be able actually to cut him. More than anything, you must be thinking of carrying your movement through to cutting him."
By increasing the challenge the way you suggest, you may very well be acting rationally toward the goal of testing yourself, but you're not doing all you can to cut the opponent. To rationally pursue winning the debate, there's no excuse for not doing your research.
In choosing not to try for that, you'll end up sending the message that rationalists don't play to win. You and I know this isn't quite accurate -- what you're doing is more like a rationalist choosing to lose a board game, because that served some other, real purpose of his -- but that is still how it will come across. Do you consider this to be acceptable?
I'm curious about why you asked the second question. It seems obvious that "the word" you're talking about is human rationality, that being the whole focus of this community. So why ask people what the word you're asking about is? Is there something more subtle going on here?
In that case, would it be a good goal to make this site more fun, independent of the focus on rationality? That way people would recommend it to each other more so the rationality information would be more effective.
I think works of fiction are the most effective way of spreading the word (logic and rationality). Personally, if it hadn't been for being exposed to rationalism from science fiction at an early age, I doubt I'd have ever come to this site.
"To understand the secret laws and relations of those high faculties of thought by which all beyond the merely perceptive knowledge of the world and of ourselves is attained or matures, is an object which does not stand in need of commendation to a rational mind."
-George Boole
"It is curious how often you humans manage to obtain that which you do not want."
-Spock
"Dear is Plato, dearer still is truth."
-Aristotle
"After a time, you may find that having is not so pleasing a thing, after all, as wanting."
-Spock