Recent work suggests that dendrites may be able to do substantial computation themselves. This implies that getting decent uploads or getting a decent preservation from cryonics may require a more fine-grained approached than is often expected. Unfortunately, the paper itself seems to be not yet online, but it is by the same group which previously suggested that dendrites could be partially responsible for memory storage.
Sillicon Valley's Ultimate Exit, a speech at Startup School 2013 by Balaji Srinivasan. He opens with the statement that America is the Microsoft of nations, goes into a discussion on Voice, Exit and good governence and continues with the wonderful observation that:
"There’s four cities that used to run the United States in the postwar era: Boston with higher ed; New York City with Madison Avenue, books, Wall Street, and newspapers; Los Angeles with movies, music, Hollywood; and, of course, DC with laws and regulations, formally running it."
He names this the Paper Belt, and claims the Valley has beem unintentionally dumping horse heads in all of their beds for the past 20 years. I would call it The Cathedral and note the NYT does not approve of this kind of talk:
First the slave South, now this.
No seriously, that is the very first line.
What probability should I assign to being completely wrong and brainwashed by Lesswrong? What steps would one take to get more actionable information on this topic? For each new visitor who comes in and accuses us of messianic groupthink how far should I update in the direction of believing them? Am I going to burn in counter factual hell for even asking?
If Lesswrong would be good at brainwashing I would expect much more people to have signed up for cryonics.
What steps would one take to get more actionable information on this topic?
Spend time outside of Lesswrong and discuss with smart people. Don't rely on a single community to give you your map of the world.
The first thing you should probably do is narrow down what specifically you feel like you may be brainwashed about. I posted some possible sample things below. Since you mention Messianic groupthink as a specific concern, some of these will relate to Yudkowsky, and some of them are Less Wrong versions of cult related control questions. (Things that are associated with cultishness in general, just rephrased to be Less Wrongish)
Do you/Have you:
1: Signed up for Cyonics.
2: Agressively donated to MIRI.
3: Check for updates on HPMOR more often then Yudkowsky said there would be on the off hand chance he updated early.
4: Gone to meet ups.
5: Went out of your way to see Eliezer Yudkowsky in person.
6: Spend time thinking, when not on Less Wrong: "That reminds me of Less Wrong/Eliezer Yudkowsky."
7: Played an AI Box experiment with money on the line.
8: Attempted to engage in a quantified self experiment.
9: Cut yourself off from friends because they seem irrational.
10: Stopped consulting other sources outside of Less Wrong.
11: Spent money on a product recommended by someone with high Karma (Example: Metamed)
12: Tried to recruit other people to Less Wrong and felt negatively if they de...
In "The Inertia of Fear and the Scientific Worldview", by the Russian computer scientist and Soviet-era dissident Valentin Turchin, in the chapter "The Ideological Hierarchy", Soviet ideology was analyzed as having four levels: philosophical level (e.g. dialectical materialism), socioeconomic level (e.g. social class analysis), history of Soviet Communism (the Party, the Revolution, the Soviet state), and "current policies" (i.e. whatever was in Pravda op-eds that week).
According to Turchin, most people in the USSR regarded the day-to-day propaganda as empty and false, but a majority would still have agreed with the historical framework, for lack of any alternative view; and the number who explicitly questioned the philosophical and socioeconomic doctrines would be exceedingly small. (He appears to not be counting religious people here, who numbered in the tens of millions, and who he describes as a separate ideological minority.)
BaconServ writes that "LessWrong is the focus of LessWrong", though perhaps the idea would be more clearly expressed as, LessWrong is the chief sacred value of LessWrong. You are allowed to doubt the content, you ...
Could people list philosophy oriented internet forums with high concentration of smart people and no significant memetic overlap so that one could test this? I don't know any and I think it's dangerous.
From Venter's new book:
...As [my team] analyzed the [smallpox] genome, we became concerned about several matters.
The first was whether the government... should allow us to publish our sequencing and analysis... Before the HIV epidemic, the smallpox variola virus had been responsible for the loss of more human life throughout history than all other infectious agents combined...
I eventually found myself in the National Institutes of Health... together with government officials from various agencies, including the department of defense. The group was very understandably worried about the open publication of the smallpox genome data. Some of the more extreme proposals included classifying my research and creating a security fence around my new institute building. It is unfortunate that the discussion did not progress to develop a well-thought-out long-term strategy. Instead the policy that was adopted was determined by the politics of the Cold War. As part of a treaty with the Soviet Union, which had been dissolved at the end of 1990, a minor strain of smallpox was being sequenced in Russia, while we were sequencing a major strain. Upon learning that the Russians were preparing to publi
The Sequences probably contain more material than an undergraduate degree in philosophy, yet there is no easy way for a student to tell if they understood the material properly. Some posts contain an occasional question/koan/meditation which is sometimes answered in the same of a subsequent post, but these are pretty scarce. I wonder if anyone qualified would like to compile a problem set for each topic? Ideally with unambiguous answers.
Is Our Final Invention available as any kind of e-book anywhere? I can find it in hardback, but not for Kindle or any kind of ePub. I'm not going to start carrying around a pile of paper in order to read it!
Am I the only person getting more and more annoyed of the cult thing? If the whole 'lesswrong is a cult' thing is not a meme that's spreading just because people are jumping on the bandwagon then I don't know what is. Can you seriously not tell? Additionally, From my POV it seems like people starting a 'are we a cult' threads/conversations do it mainly for signaling purposes.
Also, I bet new members wouldn't usually even think about whether we are a cult or not if older members were not talking about it like it is a real possibility all the bloody time. (and yes I know, the claim is not made only by people who are part of the community)
/rant
It especially annoys me when people respond to evidence-based arguments that LessWrong is not a cult with, "Well where did you come to believe all that stuff about evidence, LessWrong?"
Before LessWrong, my epistemology was basically a more clumsy version of what is now. If you described my present self to my past self, and said "Is this guy a cult victim?" he would ask for evidence. He wouldn't be thinking in terms of Bayes's theorem, but he would be thinking with a bunch of verbally expressed heuristics and analogies that usually added up to the same thing. I used to say things like "Absence of evidence is actually evidence of absence, but only if you would expect to see the evidence if the thing was true and you've checked for the evidence," which I was later delighted to see validated and formalized by probability theory.
You could of course say, "Well, that's not actually your past self, that's your present self (the cult victim)'s memories, which are distorted by mad thinking," but then you're getting into brain-in-a-vat territory. I have to think using some process. If that process is wrong but unable to detect its own wrongness, I'm sc...
(nods) Thank you.
I wonder how far a community interested in solving the "boring/irritating people" problem could get by creating a forum whose stated purpose was to respond in an engaged, attentive way to anything anyone posts there. It could be staffed by certified volunteers who were trained in techniques of nonviolent communication and committed to continuing to engage with anyone who posted there, for as long as they chose to keep doing so, and nobody but staff would be permitted to reply to posters.
Perhaps giving them easier-to-obtain attention will cause them to leave other forums where attention requires being clever or reassuring or similarly difficult valuable tings.
I'm inclined to doubt it, though.
I am somewhat tangentially reminded of a "suicide hotline" (more generally, a "call us if you're having trouble coping" hotline) where I went to college, which had come to the conclusion that they needed to make it more okay to call them, get people in the habit of doing so, so that people would use their service when they needed it. So they explicitly started the campaign of "you can call us for anything. Help on your problem sets. The Gross National Product of Kenya. The average mass of an egg. We might not know, but you can call us anyway." (This was years before the Web, let alone Google, of course.)
Sure; I have no interest in debating with you whether polyamory, homosexuality, miscegenation and other violations of sexual mores really are harmful. As you say, it would be a distraction.
My point was that if they were, it would make sense to object to an organization on the grounds that its leadership approves of/engages in harmful sexual-more-violating activities. What would not make sense is to differentially object to that organization on those grounds.
That is, accepting/endorsing/engaging sexual-more-violating activities might make LW's parent organizations dangerous, but it doesn't make them any more dangerous than many far-more-mainstream organizations that do the same things (like my college living group, the theater group I perform with, etc).
If this one of the two sketchiest things about the organization, as you suggest, it sounds to me like the organization is pretty darned close to the mainstream, which seems rather opposed to the point lmm was trying to make, and which I originally inferred you were aligning with.
So, I link to Amazon fairly frequently here, and when I do I use the referral link "ref=nosim?tag=vglnk-c319-20" to kick some money back to MIRI / whoever's paying for LW.
First, is that the right link? Second, what would it take to add that to the "Show help" box so that I don't have to dig it up whenever I want to use it, and others are more likely to use it?
If it's worth saying, but not worth its own post (even in Discussion), then it goes here.