Posts
Comments
Glancing at the comments, I see one of them addressed to "nyan", so I'm guessing it's Nyan Sandwich, who left when More Right was formed.
Survey completed in full, reporting in for karma as per ancient tradition.
Thanks to Scott and Dan for all the work they put into this!
Now that I'm curious about what I missed, where can I sign up for Louie's newsletter? I just spent ten minutes looking and I can't find it.
Many thanks for the link to the Information Hazards paper. I didn't know it existed, and I'm sort of surprised that I hadn't seen it here on LW already.
He mentions intending to write a follow-up paper toward the end, but I located the Information Hazards Bostrom's website and I don't see a second one next to it. Any idea if it exists?
The survey's exact wording is:
If multiple possible answers, please choose the one you most identify with.
So, if you for example grew up in France and currently live in the USA, and you thought of yourself primarily as being "from France" then France would be the correct answer. If you thought of yourself mainly as American, then USA would be the correct answer.
In other words, neither answer would be "wrong".
Well, I can't argue with that. I'm editing my previous comment to reverse my previous position.
Survey completed in full. Begging for karma as per ancient custom.
I choose DEFECT because presumably the money is coming out of CFAR's pocket and I assume they can use the money better than whichever random person wins the raffle. If I win, I commit to requesting it be given as an anonymous donation to CFAR.
EDIT: Having been persuaded my Yvain and Vaniver, I reverse my position and intend to spend the prize on myself. Unfortunately I've already defected and now it's too late to not be an asshole! Sorry about that. Only the slightly higher chance of winning can soothe my feelings of guilt.
... and at the same time, maybe he won't!
The pirate-specific stuff is a bit extraneous
Jack Sparrow: The only rules that really matter are these: what a [person] can do and what a [person] can't do. For instance, you can accept that [different customs from yours are traditional and commonly accepted in the world] or you can't. But [this thing you dislike] is [an inevitable feature of your human existence], boy, so you'll have to square with that some day ... So, can you [ally with somebody you find distasteful], or can you not?
The reverse story--"don't waste your time on liars"--probably shouldn't end with there actually being a wolf, as one should not expect listeners to understand the sometimes subtle separation between good decision-making and good consequences.
The lesson of the story (for the townspeople), is that when your test (the boy) turns out to be unreliable, you should devise a new test (replace him with somebody who doesn't lie).
In the past I went through a period that felt like depression, though I never talked about it to anyone so of course I wasn't diagnosed at any point. I went against your warning and played the game. The protagonist started off with more social support than I did. I chose the responses that I think I would have given when I felt depressed. This resulted the protagonist never seeking therapy or medication, and what is labeled "endingZero".
Depression Quest seems accurate. Now I feel bad. (edit: But I did get better.)
I just glanced at Yvain's spreadsheet and it looks like 681 people gave probabilities less than 1% (AKA .01 as per survey formatting) and many of those entered simply 0 which couldn't be misinterpreted either way. With about a thousand responses, <1% is the most prominent response given. No idea what data the OP could be looking at.
a god, defined as a supernatural (see above) intelligent entity
From the previous question:
supernatural events, defined as those involving ontologically basic mental entities, have occurred since the beginning of the universe?
I'm not sure what would or would not qualify as an "ontologically basic mental entity". I'd need to look it up if you wanted me to tell you whether something does or does not deserve to be called "supernatural".
This is very important for the interpretation of the question. Could the operator of a universe simulation be considered an "ontologically basic mental entity"? I'm not sure, and i can't really remember exactly how i answered the question when i took the survey.
I want to point out that it is possible that some of these downvotes* could be honest assessments of a comment history. If a user notices you by reading one comment, that user might become interested in other comments you've written, and if this person didn't like one comment, he may also dislike other comments in which you express similar ideas.
* Which were not from me, because i have not read the conversation you linked to.
I say this because i realize that i have (arguably) done it before. I noticed a comment from one particular user which deserved to be downvoted. Then i read all the related conversations and downvoted the other comments in which that user repeated more or less the same thing. Then, i began reading earlier conversations in which that user had participated, and found that many of this user's comments were bad for similar reasons, but i did upvote about 10% of them that were good.
Overall, the user who had been downvoted saw a sudden karma drop within several minutes; they specifically made an accusation of retributive downvoting.
Long story short: on at least one occasion, a user who complained about mass downvoting was actually experiencing a rapid series of honest downvotes.
I finished the survey! Including the Unreasonably Long and Complicated part which i admit took even longer than i expected.
Typo: the first question of "Part Four: Views and Opinions" refers to the "US Labour Party".
I thought he was giving extra points to Eneasz.
Hear that, Randall? You need to lampoon us better next time!
consider the effect on Thiel's income
In that case I suppose we should let Thiel tell us who to vote for.
No, the poll is actually less bad. You see, your comment proposes:
wedrifid is ( misshapen AND a troll AND has no friends )
while the poll merely asserts
wedrifid is ( misshapen XOR a troll XOR has no friends )
Wedrifid got off pretty lightly, from this perspective.
radical_negative_one is a terrible person [pollid:31]
Just one suggestion: come up with a new goal to put at the top of the list, and shift the rest down. That way, "how to hack into the computer our universe is running on" would be "up to 11" on the list.
The new #1 item could be something like "We're going to make yet another novelty t-shirt store!"
I remember once we had a big Open Thread argument about Pirates Vs Ninjas. IIRC it involved dozens of posts and when somebody pointed out that it had gone on too long, and how silly it had become, somebody else argued that it was, in fact, a useful rationality exercise.
Perhaps this [edit: cutting the conversation short] is a sign that the community has matured in some way.
I'm guessing that even if you survive, your quality of life is going to take a hit. Accounting for this will probably bring our intuitive expectation of harm closer to the actual harm.
Do we have any reliable authorities on the sociology of internet forums yet?
Thanks Xachariah, this question had occurred to me also, it's nice to see that someone else already took the risk.
If Jesus could see the entirety of history, then he could see whether he is the first "Jesus Christ". Given that the extra Christs are all explained by delusional patients copying the first Christ, this would be some sort of evidence (to himself) whether he is the real one.
Counterpoint: as Satan explains, it's all a hallucination anyway.
It just occurred to me that this is basically the state of humanity in Brave New World.
I happen to have a copy of The Dilbert Future. You're right that Scott Adams writes mainly for comedy. However, the end section of The Dilbert Future is more serious. Adams actually writes, "I'm turning the humor mode off for this chapter because what you're going to read is so strange that you'd be waiting for the punch line instead of following the point." And without re-reading the whole thing, as i recall his tone is about as serious as he promises. The serious chapter includes some quantum physics speculation, but the main idea Adams advocates is affirmations), which he ties into part of his life story.
IJ Good Institute would make me think that it was founded by IJ Good.
I remember reading, on the topic of optimal charity, that it's only rational to select a single cause to donate to... until the point of giving enough money to noticeably change the marginal utility of each additional dollar. (Thiel has that much money, of course.) This information-gathering strategy could be a new reason for spreading donations at the level of large-scale donations, if it hasn't been discussed before.
I also can't advocate Ruby as a beginner language because of its syntax.
What specifically is wrong with Ruby's syntax? (I don't know much about comparative programming languages.)
Who else is reading this page because they visited LessWrong to procrastinate?
And the first thing i see when i get here is a discussion post on internet procrastination. I feel so ridiculous now that i have no choice but to get back to work!
Ah, but perhaps there a simple fix for this: posts that would be on-topic for LessWrong are off-topic for the Off-Topic section. (edit: didn't see komponisto's comment)
I like desserts and meat, i didn't want to give myself an aversion to those things. So i selected Smoking on the list. In between the disgust images, it showed mainly... kittens, babies, and electric guitars, but very little smoking.
Who Can Participate
Requirements for participation include the following:
A baccalaureate, bachelors, or undergraduate degree from an accredited college or university (more advanced degrees are welcome); and A curiosity about how well you make predictions about world events – and an interest in exploring techniques for improvement.
Ah. After a few weeks i just assumed that the response rate or overall quality was too low to be usable.
So... we're not going to see an article built out of all the submissions?
Just to be clear, we're all reading it as-is and pronouncing it like "fig", right? Because that's how i read it in my head.
Dr. Sidney Zweibel and Dr. Emilio Lizardo
I don't know if i can trust a paper written by people with names like those... but then again, i'm probably just being irrational, just like you've explained.
I was about to ask, "How do you know it was a joke?" but then i looked at the user profile for TwistingFingers and in general his posts only make sense as dry humor.
This book is from 1873! Surely we've made some more recent advances in the science of horse-shoeing than that.
a Hacker News-style moderation system where only users with high karma could vote down.
I idly wonder if any noticeable fraction of downvotes does come from people who don't have enough karma to post toplevel articles.
I'd guess that "high karma" would refer to the threshhold needed for posting articles, which is a pretty low bar.
I read strongly downvoted posts as well, but perhaps they have more than just novelty value. For a post that is merely bad, people usually stop downvoting it once it's negative. But something voted to -10 or below is often bad in a way that serves as an example of what not to do. Heavily downvoted comments can be educational.
Sent.
Last Halloween i dressed as a P-zombie. I explained to anybody who would listen that i had the same physical composition as a conscious human being, but was not in fact conscious. I'm not sure that any of them were convinced that i really was in costume.
I wouldn't be surprised to see SMBC celebrating Baconmas. Getting a mention on that website would get you a lot more views.
Or XKCD, that's probably the biggest science-themed webcomic. There must be a few people here who frequent the XKCD forum, maybe a mention of Baconmas could be put in over there.
I agree that the website could be more colorful, it could use some strips of bacon lining the margins, or a portrait of Francis Bacon at the top.
I've takent he liberty of editing the relevant wiki page as well, to mention the current 2012 page.