Wow. Some of your other posts are intelligent, but this is pure troll-bait.
EDIT: I suppose I should share my reasoning. Copied from my other post lower down the thread:
Hello, I expect you won't like me, I'm
Classic troll opening. Challenges us to take the post seriously. Our collective 'manhood' is threatened if react normally (eg saying "trolls fuck off").
dont want to be turned onto an immortal computer-brain-thing that acts more like Eliezer thinks it should
Insulting straw man with a side of "you are an irrational cult".
I've been lurking for a long time... overcoming bias... sequences... HP:MOR... namedropping
"Seriously, I'm one of you guys". Concern troll disclaimer. Classic.
evaporative cooling... women... I'm here to help you not be a cult.
Again undertones of "you are a cult and you must accept my medicine or turn into a cult". Again we are challenged to take it seriously.
I just espoused, it'll raise the probability that you start worshiping the possibility of becoming immortal polyamorous whatever and taking over the world.
I didn't quite understand this part, but again, straw man caricature.
...I'd rather hang around a
You've got an interesting angle there, but I don't think AspiringKnitter is a troll in the pernicious sense-- her post has led to a long reasonable discussion that she's made a significant contribution to.
I do think she wanted attention, and her post had more than a few hooks to get it. However, I don't think it's useful to describe trolls as "just wanting attention". People post because they want attention. The important thing is whether they repay attention with anything valuable.
I don't have the timeline completely straight, but it looks to me like AspiringKnitter came in trolling and quickly changed gears to semi-intelligent discussion. Such things happen. AspiringKnitter is no longer a troll, that's for sure; like you say "her post has led to a long reasonable discussion that she's made a significant contribution to".
All that, however, does not change the fact that this particular post looks, walks, and quacks like troll-bait and should be treated as such. I try to stay out of the habit of judging posts on the quality of the poster's other stuff.
Thanks for letting me know. If most people disagree with my assessment, I'll adjust my troll-resistance threshold.
I just want to make sure we don't end up tolerating people who appear to have trollish intent. AspiringKnitter turned out to be positive, but I still think that particular post needed to be called out.
Well Kept Gardens Die By Pacifism.
what sort of places have you been hanging out that you got your troll sensitivity calibrated so high?
4chan, where there is an interesting dynamic around trolling and getting trolled. Getting trolled is low-status, calling out trolls correctly that no-one else caught is high-status, and trolling itself is god-status, calling troll incorrectly is low status like getting trolled. With that culture, the art of trolling, counter-trolling and troll detection gets well trained.
I learned a lot of trolling theory from reddit, (like the downvote preventer and concern trolling). The politics, anarchist, feminist and religious subreddits have a lot of good cases to study (they generally suck at managing community, tho).
I learned a lot of relevant philosophy of trolling and some more theory from /i/nsurgency boards and wikis (start at partyvan.info). Those communities are in a sorry state these days.
Alot of what I learned on 4chan and /i/ is not common knowledge around here and could be potentially useful. Maybe I'll beat some of it into a useful form and post it.
Note that declaring Crocker's rules and subsequently complaining about rudeness sends very confusing signals about how you wish to be engaged with.
Hi, I am Alyssa, a 16-year-old aspiring programmer-and-polymath who found her way to the wiki page for Egan's Law from the Achron forums. From there I started randomly clicking on links that mostly ended up leading to Eliezer's posts. I was a bit taken aback by his attitude toward religion, but I had previously seen mention of his AI Box thing (where (a) he struck me as awesome, and (b) he said some things about "intelligence" and "wisdom" that caused me to label him as an ally against all those fools who hated science), and I just loved his writing, so I spent about a week reading his stuff alternately thinking, "Wow, this guy is awesome" and "Poor atheist. Doesn't he realize that religion and science are compatible?" Eventually, some time after reading Religion's Claim to be Non-disprovable, I came to my senses. (It is a bit more complicated and embarrassing than that, but you get the idea.)
That was several months ago. I have been lurking not-quite-continuously since then, and it slowly dawned on me just how stupid I had been -- and more importantly, how stupid I still am. Reading about stuff like confirmation bias and overconfidence, I gra...
It's not that I'm having trouble communicating; it's that I'm not trying to.
So it is more just trolling.
The contents of my comments are more like expressions of complexes of emotions about complex signaling equilibria.
Which, from the various comments Will has made along these lines we can roughly translate to "via incoherent abstract rationalizations Will_Newsome has not only convinced himself that embracing the crazy while on lesswrong is a good idea but that doing so is in fact a moral virtue". Unfortunately this kind of conviction is highly resistant to persuasion. He is Doing the Right Thing. And he is doing the right thing from within a complex framework wherein not doing the right thing has potentially drastic (quasi-religious-level) consequences. All we can really do is keep the insane subset of his posts voted below the visibility threshold and apply the "don't feed the troll" policy while he is in that mode.
Turns out LW is a Chesterton-esque farce in which all posters are secretly Wills trolling Wills.
That's some interesting reasoning. I've met people before who avoided leaving an evaporatively cooling group because they recognized the process and didn't want to contribute to it, but you might be the first person I've encountered who joined a group to counteract it (or to stave it off before it begins, given that LW seems to be both growing and to some extent diversifying right now). Usually people just write groups like that off. Aside from the odd troll or ideologue that claims similar motivations but is really just looking for a fight, at least-- but that doesn't seem to fit what you've written here.
Anyway. I'm not going to pretend that you aren't going to find some hostility towards Abrahamic religion here, nor that you won't be able to find any arguably problematic (albeit mostly unconsciously so) attitudes regarding sex and/or gender. Act as your conscience dictates should you find either one intolerable. Speaking for myself, though, I take the Common Interest of Many Causes concept seriously: better epistemology is good for everyone, not just for transhumanists of a certain bent. Your belief structure might differ somewhat from the tribal average around here, but the actual goal of this tribe is to make better thinkers, and I don't think anyone's going to want to exclude you from that as long as you approach it in good faith.
In fewer words: welcome to Less Wrong.
Erm. I can't say that this raises my confidence much. I am reminded of the John McCarthy quote, "Your denial of the importance of objectivity amounts to announcing your intention to lie to us. No-one should believe anything you say."
people who only want me to hate God
I don't think there are any of those around here. Most of us would prefer you didn't even believe in gods!
My name's Normal Anomaly, and I'm paranoid about giving away personal information on the Internet. Also, I don't like to have any assumptions made about me (though this is likely the last place to worry about that), so I'd rather go without a gender, race, etc. Apologies for the lack of much personal data. I can say that my major interest is biology, although I am not yet anything resembling an expert. I eventually hope to work in life extension research. I’m an Asperger’s Syndrome Sci Fi-loving nerd, which is apparently the norm here.
I used to have religious/spiritual beliefs, though I was also a fan of science and was not a member of an organized religion. I believed it was important to be rational and that I had evidence for my beliefs, but I was rationalizing and refusing to look at the hard questions. A couple years ago, I was exposed to atheism and rationalism and have since been trying to make myself more reasonable/less insane. I found LW through Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality a few months ago, and have been lurking and reading the sequences. I'm still scared of posting on here because it’s the first discussion forum where I have known myself to be intellectual...
Actually, I've come to notice that rhetoric and other so-called Dark Arts are still worth their weight in gold on LW, except when the harder subjects (math and logic) are at hand.
But LessWrong commenters definitely have plenty of psychological levers, and the demographic uniformity only makes them more effective. For a simple example, I guesstimate that, in just about any comment, a passing mention of how smart LessWrongers are is worth on average 3 or 4 extra karma points - and this is about as old as tricks can get.
I'm Ellen, age 14, student, planning to major in molecular biology or something like that. I'm not set on it, though.
I think I was browsing wikipedia when I decided to google some related things. I think I found some libertarian or anarchist blog that then had a link to Overcoming Bias or Lesswrong. Or I might've seen the word transhumanism on the wiki page for libertarianism and googled it, with it eventually leading here somehow. My memory is fuzzy as it was pretty irrelevant to me.
I'm an atheist, and have been for a while, as is typical for this community. I wasn't brought up religiously, so it was pretty much untheism that turned into atheism.
My rationalist roots... I've always wanted to be right, of course. Partly because I could make mistakes from being wrong, partly because I really, really hated looking stupid. Then I figured that I couldn't know if I was right unless I listened to the other side, really listened, and was careful. (Not enough people do even this. People are crazy, the world is mad. Angst, angst.) I found lesswrong which has given me tools to much more effectively do this. w00t.
I'm really lazy. Curse you, akrasia!
It should be obvious how I came up with my us...
Hi, Aspiring Knitter. I also find the Less Wrong culture and demographics quite different from my normal ones (being a female in the social sciences who's sympathetic to religion though not a believer. Also, as it happens, a knitter.) I stuck around because I find it refreshing to be able to pick apart ideas without getting written off as too brainy or too cold, which tends to happen in the rest of my life.
Sorry for the lack of persecution - you seem to have been hoping for it.
Hi, I'm Zoe. I found this site in a round-about way after reading Dawkin's The God Delusion and searching some things related to it. There was a comment in a forum mentioning Less Wrong and I was interested to see what it was.
I've been mainly lurking for the past few months, reading the sequences and some of the top posts. I've found that while I understand most of it, my high-school level math (I'm 16) is quite inadequate, so I'm working through the Khan Academy to try and improve it.
I'm drawn to rationalism because, quite simply, it seems like the world would be a better place if people were more rational and that has to start somewhere. Whatever the quotes say, truth is worthwhile. It also makes me believe in myself more to know that I'm willing and somewhat able to shift my views to better match the territory. Maybe someday I'll even advance from 'somewhat' into plain ol' 'able'.
My goals here, at this point, aren't particularly defined. I find the articles and the mission inspiring and interesting and think that it will help me. Maybe when I've learnt more I'll have a clearer goal for myself. I already analyze everything (to the point where many a teacher has been quite annoyed), so I suppose that's a start. I'm looking forward to learning more and seeing how I can use it all in my actual life.
Cheers, Zoe
That doesn't sound right. Here's a quote from Crocker's rules:
Anyone is allowed to call you a moron and claim to be doing you a favor.
Another quote:
Note that Crocker's Rules does not mean you can insult people; it means that other people don't have to worry about whether they are insulting you.
Quote from our wiki:
Thus, one who has committed to these rules largely gives up the right to complain about emotional provocation, flaming, abuse and other violations of etiquette
There's a decision theoretic angle here. If I declare Crocker's rules, and person X calls me a filthy anteater, then I might not care about getting valuable information from them (they probably don't have any to share) but I refrain from lashing out anyway! Because I care about the signal I send to person Y who is still deciding whether to engage with me, who might have a sensitive detector of Crocker's rules violations. And such thoughtful folks may offer the most valuable critique. I'm afraid you might have shot yourself in the foot here.
Welcome to LessWrong!
You guys really hate Christians, after all. (Am I actually allowed to be here or am I banned for my religion?)
Do we? Do you hate Hindus, or do you just think they're wrong?
One thing I slightly dislike about "internet atheists" is the exclusive focus on religion as a source of all that's wrong in the world, whereas you get very similar forms of irrationality in partisan politics or nationalism. I'm not alone in holding that view - see this for some related ideas. At best, religion can be about focusing human's natural irrationality in areas that don't matter (cosmology instead of economics), while facilitating morality and cooperative behavior. I understand that some Americans atheists are more hostile to religion than I am (I'm French, religion isn't a big issue here, except for Islam), because they have to deal with religious stupidity on a daily basis.
Note that a Mormon wrote a series of posts that was relatively well received, so you may be overestimating LessWrong's hostility to religion.
Hello.
I've been reading Less Wrong from its beginning. I stumbled upon Overcoming Bias just as LW was being launched. I'm a young mathematician (an analyst, to be more specific) currently working towards a PhD and I'm very interested in epistemic rationality and the theory of altruist instrumental rationality. I've been very impressed with the general quality of discussion about the theory and general practice of truth-seeking here, even though I can think of places where I disagree with the ideas that I gather are widely accepted here. The most interesting discussions seem to be quite old, though, so reviving those discussions out of the blue hasn't felt like - for lack of a better word - a proper thing to do.
There are many discussions here of which I don't care about. A large proportion of people here are programmers or otherwise from a CS background, and that colors the discussions a lot. Or maybe it's just that the prospect of an AGI in recent future doesn't seem at all likely to me. Anyway, the AI/singularity stuff, the tangentially related topics that I bunch together with them, and approaching rationality topics from a programmer's point of view I just don't care about. Not ...
Easiest first: I introduced "dark arts" as an example of a label that distracted more than it added. It wasn't meant as a reference to or description of your posts.
In your previous comment, you asked the wrong question ('were they attempting to persuade?') and then managed to come up with the wrong answer ('nope'). Both of those were disappointing (the first more so) especially in light of your desire to spread your experience.
The persuasion was "please respond to me nicely." It was richly rewarded: 20 welcoming responses (when most newbies get 0 or 1), and the first unwelcoming response got downvoted quickly.
The right question is, what are our values, here? When someone expressing a desire to be welcomed uses influence techniques that further that end, should we flip the table over in disgust that they tried to influence us? That'll show them that we're savvy customers that can't be trolled! Or should we welcome them because we want the community to grow? That'll show them that we're worth sticking around.
I will note that I upvoted this post, because in the version that I saw it started off with "Some of your other posts are intelligent" and then show...
Sorry, where does God say this? You are a Christian right? I'm not aware of any verse in either the OT or NT that calls for monogamy. Jacob has four wives, Abraham has two, David has quite a few and Solomon has hundreds. The only verses that seem to say anything negative in this regard are some which imply that Solomon just has way too many. The text strongly implies that polyandry is not ok but polygyny is fine. The closest claim is Jesus's point about how divorcing one woman and then marrying another is adultery, but that's a much more limited claim (it could be that the other woman was unwilling to be a second wife for example). 1 Timothy chapter 3 lists qualifications for being a church leader which include having only one wife. That would seem to imply that having more than one wife is at worst suboptimal.
That is a really good point. (Actually, Jesus made a stronger point than that: even lusting after someone you're not married to is adultery.)
You know, you could actually be right. I'll have to look more carefully. Maybe my understanding has been biased by the culture in which I live. Upvoted for knowledgeable rebuttal of a claim that might not be correct.
WHO I AM: I have 24 years of existence. I give math, chemistry and physics lessons to high school students since 17. I am pretty good at it and I never announced anywhere on planet that I give lessons - all new students appear from recommendations from older students. On the end of 2016 I already had 38 months going to the university, trying to get mechanical engineering credentials. I wasn't interested on the course - I really liked the math and the subjects, but the teachers sucked and the experience was, in general, terrible. I hated my life and was doing it just to look good for my parents - always loved arts and I study classical music since 14. I heard about "artificial intelligence" just once, and I decided all my actions in life should be towards automate the process of learning. I started a MIT Python course and then dropped out university. I am completely passionate about learning.
WHAT I'M DOING: (short-term) I am currently learning and doing beautiful animations with the python library called MANIM (Mathematical ANIMations). I am searching for people to unite forces to transform tens of posts in The Sequences into video content with this library. I h...
Hello! I'm a first-year graduate student in pure mathematics at UC Berkeley. I've been reading LW posts for awhile but have only recently started reading (and wanting to occasionally add to) the comments. I'm interested in learning how to better achieve my goals, learning how to choose better goals, and "raising the sanity waterline" generally. I have recently offered to volunteer for CFAR and may be an instructor at SPARC 2013.
But pointing this out to you doesn't change your mind because you value having most people be willing to engage in casual sex (am I wrong here? I don't know you, specifically)
I can't speak for Emile, but my own views look something like this:
Thus, I would say that I value "most people being able to engage in casual sex". I make no judgement, however, whether "most people should be willing to engage in casual sex". If you value monogamy, then you should be able to engage in monogamous sex, and I can see no reason why anyone could say that your desires are wrong.
(*) As well as many of our most prominent politicians. Heh.
Hello, Less Wrong.
I suppose I should have come here first, before posting anything else, but I didn't come here through the front door. :3 Rather, I was brought here by way of HP:MOR, as I'm sure many newbies were.
My name is Anthony. I'm 21 years old, married, studying Linguistics, and I'm an unapologetic member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints.
Should be fun.
Hello, Less Wrong.
My name is Zachary Vance. I'm an undergraduate student at the University of Cincinnati, double majoring in Mathematics and Computer Science--I like math better. I am interested in games, especially board and card games. One of my favorite games is Go.
I've been reading Less Wrong for 2-3 months now, and I posted once or twice under another name which I dropped because I couldn't figure out how to change names without changing accounts. I got linked here via Scott Aaronson's blog Shtetl-Optimized after seeing a debate between him and Eliezer. I got annoyed at Eliezer for being rude, forgot about it for a month, and followed the actual link on Scott's site over here. (In case you read this Eliezer, you both listen to people more than I thought (update, in Bayesian) and write more interesting things than I heard in the debate.) I like paradoxes and puzzles, and am currently trying to understand the counterfactual mugging. I've enjoyed Less Wrong because everybody here seems to read everything and usually carefully think about it before they post, which means not only articles but also comments are simply amazing compared to other sites. It also means I try not to post too much so Less Wrong remains quality.
I am currently applying to work at the Singularity Institute.
OK.
FWIW, I agree that nyan-sandwich's tone was condescending, and that they used vulgar words.
I also think "I suppose they can't be expected to behave any better, we should praise them for not being completely awful" is about as condescending as anything else that's been said in this thread.
Yeah, you're probably right. I didn't mean for that to come out that way (when I used to spend a lot of time on places with low standards, my standards were lowered, too), but that did end up insulting. I'm sorry, nyan_sandwich.
You guys really hate Christians, after all. (Am I actually allowed to be here or am I banned for my religion?)
Technically, it's "Christianity" that some of us don't like very much. Many of us live in countries where people who call themselves "Christians" compose much of the population, and going around hating everyone we see won't get us very far in life. We might wish that they weren't Christians, but while we're dreaming we might as well wish for a pony, too.
And, no, we don't ban people for saying that they're Christians. It takes a lot to get banned here.
I shouldn't be here; you don't want me here, not to mention I probably shouldn't bother talking to people who only want me to hate God.
Well, so far you haven't given us much of a reason to want you gone. Also, people who call themselves atheists usually don't really care whether or not you "hate God" any more than we care about whether you "hate Santa Claus".
Why am I even here again? Seriously, why am I not just lurking? That would make more sense.
Greetings, LessWrong!
I'm Saro, currently 19, female and a mathematics undergraduate at the University of Cambridge. I discovered LW by the usual HP:MoR route, though oddly I discovered MoR via reading EY's website, which I found in a Google search about Bayes' once. I'm feeling rather fanatical about MoR at the moment, and am not-so-patiently awaiting chapter 78.
Generally though, I've found myself stuck here a lot because I enjoy arguing, and I like convincing other people to be less wrong. Specifically, before coming across this site, I spent a lot of time reading about ways of making people aware of their own biases when interpreting data, and effective ways of communicating statistics to people in a non-misleading way (I'm a big fan of the work being done by David Spiegelhalter). I'm also quite fond of listening to economics and politics arguments and trying to tear them down, though through this, I've lost any faith in politics as something that has any sensible solutions.
I suspect that I'm pretty bad at overcoming my own biases a lot of the time. In particular, I have a very strong tendency to believe what I'm told (including what I'm being told by this site), I'm particularly...
Hello fellow Less Wrongians,
My name is Josh and I'm a 16-year-old junior in high school. I live in a Jewish family at the Jersey Shore. I found the site by way of TV Tropes after a friend told me about the Methods of Rationality. Before i started reading Eliezer's posts, i made the mistake of believing I was smart. My goal here is mainly to just be the best that I can be and maybe learn to lead a better life. And by that I mean that I want to be better than everyone else I meet. That includes being a more rational person better able to understand complex issues. I think i have a fair grip on the basic points of rationality as well as philosophy, but i am sorely lacking in terms of math and science (which can't be MY fault obviously, so I'll just go ahead and blame the public school system). I never knew what exactly an logarithm WAS before a few days ago, sadly enough (I knew the term of course, but was never taught what it meant or bothered enough to look it up. I have absolutely no idea what i want to do with my life other than amassing knowledge of whatever i find to be interesting.
I was raised in a conservative household, believing in God but still trying to look at the world r...
HI, I'm GDC3. Those are my initials. I'm a little nervous about giving my full name on the internet, especially because my dad is googlible and I'm named after him. (Actually we're both named after my grandfather, hence the 3) But I go by G.D. in real life anyway so its not exactly not my name. I'm primarily working on learning math in advance of returning to college right now.
Sorry if this is TMI but you asked: I became an aspiring rationalist because I was molested as a kid and I knew that something was wrong, but not what it was or how to stop it, and I figure that if I didn't learn how the world really worked instead of what people told me, stuff like that might keep happening to me. So I guess my something to protect was me.
My something to protect is still mostly me, because most of my life is still dealing with the consequences of that. My limbic system learned all sorts of distorted and crazy things about how the world works that my neocortex has to spend all of its time trying to compensate for. Trying to be a functional human being is sort of hard enough goal for now. I also value and care about eventually using this information to help other people who've had simi...
Hi, I'm Taryn. I'm female, 35 and working as a web developer. I started studying Math, changed to Comp Sci and actually did my degree in Cognitive Science (Psychology of intelligence, Neurophysiology, AI, etc) My 3rd year Project was on Cyberware.
When I graduated I didn't see any jobs going in the field and drifted into Web Development instead... but I've stayed curious about AI, along with SF, Science, and everything else too. I kinda wish I'd known about Singularity research back then... but perhaps it's better this way. I'm not a "totally devoted to one subject" kinda person. I'm too curious about everything to settle for a single field of study.
That being said - I've worked in web development now for 11 years. Still, when I get home, I don't start programming, preferring pick up a book on evolutionary biology, medieval history, quantum physics, creative writing (etc) instead. There's just too damn many interesting things to learn about to just stick to one!
I found LW via Harry Potter & MOR, which my sister forwarded to me. Since then I've been voraciously reading my way through the sequences, learning just how much I have yet to learn... but totally fascinated. This site is awesome.
Hi, I'm Sarah. I'm 21 and going to grad school in math next fall. I'm interested in applied math and analysis, and I'm particularly interested in recent research about the sparse representation of large data sets. I think it will become important outside the professional math community. (I have a blog about that at http://numberblog.wordpress.com/.)
As far as hobbies go, I like music and weightlifting. I read and talk far too much about economics, politics, and philosophy. I have the hairstyle and cultural vocabulary of a 1930's fast-talking dame. (I like the free, fresh wind in my hair, life without care; I'm broke, that's Oke!)
Why am I here? I clicked the link from Overcoming Bias.
In more detail, I'm here because I need to get my life in order. I'm a confused Jew, not a thoroughgoing atheist. I've been a liberal and then a libertarian and now need something more flexible and responsive to reason than either.
Some conversations with a friend, who's a philosopher, have led me to understand that there are some experiences (in particular, experiences he's had related to poverty and death) that nothing in my intellectual toolkit can deal with, and so I've had to reconsider a ...
Rationalist origin: I discovered the scientific method in highschool and liked the results of its application to previously awkward social situations, so I extended it to life in general. I came up with most of OB's earlier material by myself under different names, or not quite as well articulated, and this community has helped refine my thoughts and fill in gaps.
Found LW: The FireFox add-on StumbleUpon took me to EY's FAQ about the Meaning of Life on 23 October 2005, along with Max More, Nick Bostrom, Alcor, Sentient Developments, the Transhumanism Wikipedia page, and other resources. From there, to further essays, to the sl4 mailing list, to SIAI, to OB, to LW, where I started interacting with the community in earnest in late January 2010 and achieved 1000 karma in early June 2010. Previous to the StumbleUpon treasure trove, I had been ...
Downvoted, by the way. I want to signal my distaste for being confused for you. Are you using some form of mind-altering substance or are you normally like this? I think you need to take a few steps back. And breathe. And then study how to communicate more clearly, because I think either you're having trouble communicating or I'm having trouble understanding you.
hi everybody,
I'm 22, male, a student and from Germany. I've always tried to "perceive whatever holds the world together in its inmost folds", to know the truth, to grok what is going on. Truth is the goal, and rationality the art of achieving it. So for this reason alone lesswrong is quite appealing.
But in addition to that Yudkowsky and Bostrom convinced me that existential risks, transhumanism , the singularity, etc. are probably the most important issues of our time.
Furthermore this is the first community I've ever encountered in my life that makes me feel rather dumb. ( I can hardly follow the discussions about solomonoff induction, everett-branches and so on, lol, and I thought I was good at math because I was the best one in high school :-) But, nonetheless being stupid is sometimes such a liberating feeling!
To spice this post with more gooey self-disclosure: I was sort of a "mild" socialist for quite some time ( yeah, I know. But, there are some intelligent folks who were socialists, or sort-of-socialists like Einstein and Russell). Now I'm more pro-capitalism, libertarian, but some serious doubts remain. I'm really interested in neuropsychological research of mystic exp...
Good day I'm a fifteen year-old high school student, Junior, and ended up finding this through the Harry Potter & MOR story, which I thought would be a lot less common to people. Generally I think I'm not that rational of a person, I operate mostly on reaction and violence, and instinctively think of things like 'messages' and such when I have some bad luck; but, I've also found some altruistic passion in me, and I've done all of this self observation which seems contradictory, but I think that's all a rationalization to make me a better person. I also have some odd moods, which split between talking like this, when usually I can't like this at all.
I'd say something about my age group but I can't think of anything that doesn't sound like hypocrisy, so I think I'll cut this off here.
Hi everyone, I've been reading LW for a year or so, and met some of you at the May minicamp. (I was the guy doing the swing dancing.) Great to meet you, in person and online.
I'm helping Anna Salamon put together some workshops for the meetup groups, and I'll be posting some articles on presentation skills to help with that. But in order to do that, I'll need 5 points (I think). Can you help me out with that?
Thanks
Mike
Do you really think it's only a bit overstated? I mean, has anybody been banned for being religious? And has anybody here indicated that they hate Christians without immediately being called on falling into blue vs. green thinking?
Okay, ready to be shouted down. I'll be counting the downvotes as they roll in, I guess. You guys really hate Christians, after all. (Am I actually allowed to be here or am I banned for my religion?) I'll probably just leave soon anyway. Nothing good can come of this. I don't know why I'm doing this. I shouldn't be here; you don't want me here, not to mention I probably shouldn't bother talking to people who only want me to hate God. Why am I even here again? Seriously, why am I not just lurking? That would make more sense.
From her other posts, AspiringKnitter strikes me as being open-minded and quite intelligent, but that last paragraph really irks me. It's self-debasing in an almost manipulative way - as if she actually wants us to talk to her like we "only want [her] to hate God" or as if we "really hate Christians". Anybody who has spent any non-trivial amount of time on LW would know that we certainly don't hate people we disagree with, at least to the best of my knowledge, so asserting that is not a charitable or reasonable expectation. Plus, it seems that it would now be hard(er) to downvote her because she specifically said she expects that, even given a legitimate reason to downvote.
Hello everyone,
My name is Allison, and I'm 15 years old. I'll be a junior next year. I come from a Christian background, and consider myself to also be a theist, for reasons that I'm not prepared to discuss at the moment... I wish to learn how to view the world as it is, not through a tinted lens that is limited in my own experiences and background.
While I find most everything on this site to be interesting, I must confess a particular hunger towards philosophy. I am drawn to philosophy as a moth is to a flame. However, I am relatively ignorant about pretty much everything, something I'm attempting to fix. I have a slightly above average intelligence, but nothing special. In fact, compared to everyone on this site, I'm rather stupid. I don't even understand half of what people are talking about half the time.
I'm not a science or math person, although I find them interesting, my strengths lie in English and theatre arts. I absolutely adore theatre, not that this really has much to do with rationality. Anyway, I kind of want to get better at science and math. I googled the double slit experiment, and I find it.. captivating. Quantum physics holds a special kind of appeal to me, but unfortunately, is something that I'm not educated enough to pursue at the moment.
My goals are to become more rational, learn more about philosophy, gain a basic understanding of math and science, and to learn more about how to refine the human art of rationality. :)
Hello everyone!
Name: Tuesday Next Age: 19 Gender: Female
I am an undergraduate student studying political science, with a focus on international relations. I have always been interested in rationalism and finding the reasons for things.
I am an atheist, but this is more a consequence of growing up in a relatively nonreligious household. I did experiment with paganism and witchcraft for several years, a rather frightening (in retrospect) display of cognitive dissonance as I at once believed in science and some pretty unscientific things.
Luckily I was able to to learn from experience, and it soon become obvious that what I believed in simply didn't work. I think I wanted to believe in witchcraft both as a method of teenage rebellion and to exert some control over my life. However I was unable to delude myself.
I tried to interest myself in philosophy many times, but often became frustrated by the long debates that seemed divorced from reality. One example is the idea of free will. Since I was a child (I have a memory of trying, when I was in elementary school, of trying to explain this to my parents without success) I have had a conception of reality and free will that seemed fa...
Hi, AspiringKnitter!
There have been several openly religious people on this site, of varying flavours. You don't (or shouldn't) get downvoted just for declaring your beliefs; you get downvoted for faulty logic, poor understanding and useless or irrelevant comments. As someone who stopped being religious as a result of reading this site, I'd love for more believers to come along. My impulse is to start debating you right away, but I realise that'd just be rude. If you're interested, though, drop me a PM, because I'm still considering the possibility I might have made the wrong decision.
The evaporative cooling risk is worrying, now that you mention it... Have you actually noticed that happening here during your lurking days, or are you just pointing out that it's a risk?
Oh, and dedicating an entire paragraph to musing about the downvotes you'll probably get, while an excellent tactic for avoiding said downvotes, is also annoying. Please don't do that.
Talk of Aumann Agreement notwithstanding, the usual rules of human social intercourse that allow "I am no longer interested in continuing this discussion" as a legitimate conversational move continue to apply on this site. If you don't wish to discuss your religious beliefs, then don't.
Well, for any given conversation about religion, yes. (Obviously, I expect different things if I post a comment about HP:MoR on that thread.)
I expected the last one, since mostly no matter what I do, internet discussions on anything important have a tendency to do that. (And it's not just when I'm participating in them!) I considered any conversions highly unlikely and didn't really expect the interaction to be stopped.
My expectations have changed a lot. After a while I realized that hateful insults weren't happening very much here on Less Wrong, which is awesome, and that the frequency didn't seem to increase with the length of the discussion, unlike other parts of the internet. So I basically assumed the conversation would go on forever. Now, having been told otherwise, I realize that conversations can actually be ended by the participants without one of these things happening.
That was a failure on my part, but would have correctly predicted a lot of the things I'd experienced in the past. I just took an outside view when an inside view would have been better because it really is different this time. That failure is adequately explained by the use of the outside view heuristic, which is usually useful, and the fact that I ended up in a new situation which lacked the characteristics that caused what I observed in the past.
How would gwern, Alicorn or NancyLebowitz confirm that anything I said by phone meant AspiringKnitter isn't Will Newsome? They could confirm that they talked to a person. How could they confirm that that person had made AspiringKnitter's posts? How could they determine that that person had not made Will Newsome's posts?
Hello. I expect you won't like me because I'm Christian and female and don't want to be turned into an immortal computer-brain-thing that acts more like Eliezer thinks it should.
I don't think you'll be actively hated here by most posters (and even then, flamewars and trolling here are probably not what you'd expect from most other internet spaces)
it'll raise the probability that you start worshiping the possibility of becoming immortal polyamorous whatever and taking over the world.
I wouldn't read polyamory as a primary shared feature of the posters here -- and this is speaking as someone who's been poly her entire adult life. Compared to most mainstream spaces, it does come up a whole lot more, and people are generally unafraid of at least discussing the ins and outs of it.
(I find it hard to imagine how you could manage real immortality in a universe with a finite lifespan, but that's neither here nor there.)
You guys really hate Christians, after all. (Am I actually allowed to be here or am I banned for my religion?)
You have to do a lot weirder or more malicious than that to get banned here. I frequently argue inarticulately for things that are rather unpopular here, ...
the possibility of becoming immortal polyamorous whatever and taking over the world.
I think I just found my new motto in life :-)
You guys really hate Christians, after all.
I personally am an atheist, and a fairly uncompromising one at that, but I still find this line a little offensive. I don't hate all Christians. Many (or probably even most) Christians are perfectly wonderful people; many of them are better than myself, in fact. Now, I do believe that Christians are disastrously wrong about their core beliefs, and that the privileged position that Christianity enjoys in our society is harmful. So, I disagree with most Christians on this topic, but I don't hate them. I can't hate someone simply for being wrong, that just makes no sense.
That said, if you are the kind of Christian who proclaims, in all seriousness, that (for example) all gay people should be executed because they cause God to send down hurricanes -- then I will find it very, very difficult not to hate you. But you don't sound like that kind of a person.
Hey everyone.
I'm Jandila (not my birth, legal or even everyday name), I'm a 28-year old transgendered woman living in Minnesota. I've been following EY's writings off and on since many years ago on the sl4 mailing list, mostly on the topic of AI; initially I got interested in cognitive architecture and FAI due to a sci-fi novel I've been working on forever. I discovered LW a few years ago but only recently started posting; somehow I missed this thread until just recently.
I've been interested in bias and how people think, and in modifying my own instrumental ability to understand and work around it, for many years. I'm on the autistic spectrum and have many clusters of neurological weirdness; I think this provided an early incentive to understand "how people think" so I could signal-match better.
So far I've stuck around because I like LW's core mission and what it stands for in abstract; I also feel that the community here is a bit too homogenous in terms of demographics for a community with such an ostensibly far-reaching, global goal, and thus want to see the perspective base broadened (and am encouraged by the recent influx of female members).
Hey everyone,
My name is Jennifer Davies. I'm 35 years old and am married with a 3 year old daughter. I live in Kitchener, Ontario, Canada.
Originally a computer programmer, I gave it up after spending a year coding for a bank (around 1997). Motivated by an interest in critical thinking, I earned a BA in Philosophy.
Currently, I'm completing a one year post-grad program to become a Career Development Practitioner. I plan to launch a private practice in 2012 to help people find and live their passions while providing them with the tools to do so.
A friend introduced me to Harry Potter: Methods of Rationality and Less Wrong. I have never enjoyed a piece of reading more than that fanfic -- I even saved a PDF version to introduce to my daughter once she's able to benefit from it.
My main motivations (that I'm aware of) for becoming a member of this community are to: improve my thinking skills (and better understand/evaluate values and motivations), help clients to think more rationally, better encourage independent, critical thought in my daughter.
Although it can be painful at times (for my ego) to be corrected, I appreciate such corrections and the time put into them.
Any tips for teaching young children rationality? I'm at a loss and wonder if I need to wait until she's older.
I've existed for about 24 years, and currently live in Boston.
I regard many of the beliefs popular here - cyronics, libertarianism, human biodiversity, pickup artistry - with extreme skepticism. (As if in compensation, I have my own unpopular frameworks for understanding the world.) I find the zeitgeist here to be interestingly wrong, though, because almost everyone comes from a basically sane starting point - a material universe, conventionally "Western" standards of science, reason, and objectivity - and actively discusses how they can regulate their beliefs to adhere to these. I have an interest in achieving just this kind of regulation (am a "rationalist",) and am aware that it's epistemically healthy to expose myself to alternative points of view expressed in a non-crazy way. So hopefully the second aspect will reinforce the first.
As for why I'm a rationalist, I don't know, and the question doesn't seem particularly interesting to me. I regard it beyond questions of justification, like other desires.
Hi all, I'm Jen, an Australian Jewish atheist, and an student in a Computer Science/Linguistics/Cognitive Science combined degree, in which I am currently writing a linguistics thesis. I got here through recommendations from a couple of friends who visit here and stayed mostly for the akrasia and luminosity articles (hello thesis and anxiety/self-esteem problems!) Oh and the other articles too, but the ones I've mentioned are the ones that I've put the most effort into understanding and applying. The others are just interesting and marked for further processing at some later time.
I think I was born a rationalist rather than becoming one - I have a deep-seated desire for things to have reasons that make sense, by which I mean the "we ran some experiments and got this answer" kind of sense as opposed to the "this validates my beliefs" kind of sense. Although having said that I'm still prey to all kinds of irrationality, hence this site being helpful.
At some point in the future I would be interested in writing something about linguistic pragmatics - it's basically another scientific way of looking at communication. There's a lot of overlap between pragmatics and the ideas I've seen here on status and signalling, but it's all couched in different language and emphasises different parts, so it may be different enough to be helpful to others. But at the moment I have no intention of writing anything beyond this comment (hello thesis again!), the account is mostly just because I got sick of not being able to upvote anything.
I freely admit that I have one sockpuppet, who has made less than five comments and has over 20 karma.
I have a private message, dated 7 October, from an account with "less than five comments and [...] over 20 karma", which begins, "I'm Will_Newsome, this is one of my alts." (Emphasis mine.)
Will, I'm sorry it's turning out like this. I am not perfect myself; anyone who cares may look up users "Bananarama" and "OperationPaperclip" and see my own lame anonymous humor. More to the point, I do actually believe that you want to "keep the stars from burning down", and you're not just a troll out to waste everyone's time. The way I see it, because you have neither a job to tie you down, nor genuine intellectual peers and collaborators, it's easy to end up seeking the way forward via elaborate crazy schemes, hatched and pursued in solitude; and I suspect that I got in the way of one such scheme, by asserting that AK is you.
I'm confused. What happened overnight that made people suddenly start appreciating Will's advocacy of his own trolling here and the surrounding context? -5 to +7 is a big change and there have been similar changes to related comments. Either someone is sockpuppeting or people are actually starting to appreciate this crap. (I'm really hoping the former!)
Edit: And now it is back to -3. How bizarre!
Okay good, it took awhile for this to get downvoted and I was starting to get even more worried about the local sanity waterline.
I suspect that the reason for this is that the comment tree of which your post was a branch of is hidden by default, as it originates from a comment with less than -3 karma.
Um, on another note, could you just be less mean? 'Mean' seems to be the most accurate descriptor for posting trash that people have to downvote to stay hidden, after all.
Stick around. Your contributions are fine. Not everyone will be accusatory like nyan_sandwich.
Read through the Sequences and comment on what seems good to you.
In addition to what APMason said, I think that many Christians would disagree with your second statement:
I doubt it'd be useful to go around trying to police people's morals.
Some of them are campaigning right now on the promise that they will "police people's morals"...
EY has read With Folded Hands and mentioned it in his CEV writeup as one more dystopia to be averted. This task isn't getting much attention now because unfriendly AI seems to be more probable and more dangerous than almost-friendly AI. Of course we would welcome any research on preventing almost-friendly AI :-)
Not everyone agrees with Eliezer on everything; this is usually not that explicit, but consider e.g. the number of people talking about relationships vs. the number of people talking about cryonics or FAI - LW doesn't act, collectively, as if it really believes Eliezer is right. It does assume that there is no God/god/supernatural, though.
(Also, where does this idea of atheists hating God come from? Most atheists have better things to do than hang on /r/atheism!)
For my own part, I think you're treating "being nice" and "liking the Christian God" and "hating Christians" and "wanting other people to hate God" and "only wanting other people to hate God" and "forcibly exterminating all morality" and various other things as much more tightly integrated concepts than they actually are, and it's interfering with your predictions.
So I suggest separating those concepts more firmly in your own mind.
To be fair, I'm sure a bunch of people here disapprove of some actions by the Christian God in the abstract (mostly Old Testament stuff, probably, and the Problem of Evil). But yeah, for the most part LWers are pretty nice, if a little idiosyncratic!
Azathoth (the "blind idiot god") is the local metaphor for evolution - a pointless, monomaniacal force with vast powers but no conscious goal-seeking ability and thus a tendency to cause weird side-effects (such as human culture).
Azathoth is how Eliezer described the process of evolution, not how he described the christian god.
Hi, my handle is gscshoyru (gsc for short), and I'm new here. I found this site through the AIBox experiment, oddly enough -- and I think I got there from TVTropes, though I don't remember. After reading the fiction, (and being vaguely confused that I had read the NPC story before, but nothing else of his, since I'm a fantasy/sci-fi junkie and I usually track down authors I like), I started reading up on all of Eliezer's writings on rationality. And found it made a lot of sense. So, I am now a budding rationalist, and have decided to join this site because it is awesome.
That's how I found you -- as for who I am and such, I am a male 22-year-old mathematics major/CS minor currently working as a programmer in New Jersey. So, that's me. Hi everyone!
What about when information is obscured by deliberate impoliteness?
Basically, no. If you want to criticize people for being rude to you just don't operate by Crocker's rules. Make up different ones.
Crocker's rules don't say "explain things in an insulting way", they say "don't soften the truths you speak to me". You can optimize for information-- and even get it across better-- when you're not trying to be rude.
A lot of intelligent folks have to spend a lot of energy trying not to be rude, and part of the point of Crocker's Rules is to remove that burden by saying you won't call them on rudeness.
Being honest and having reasonable expectations of being treated like a troll does not disqualify a post from being a troll.
Hello, I expect you won't like me, I'm
Classic troll opening. Challenges us to take the post seriously. Our collective 'manhood' is threatened if react normally (eg saying "trolls fuck off").
dont want to be turned onto an immortal computer-brain-thing that acts more like Eliezer thinks it should
Insulting straw man with a side of "you are an irrational cult".
I've been lurking for a long time... overcoming bias... sequences... HP:MOR... namedropping
"Seriously, I'm one of you guys". Concern troll disclaimer. Classic.
evaporative cooling... women... I'm here to help you not be a cult.
Again undertones of "you are a cult and you must accept my medicine or turn into a cult". Again we are challenged to take it seriously.
I just espoused, it'll raise the probability that you start worshiping the possibility of becoming immortal polyamorous whatever and taking over the world.
I didn't quite understand this part, but again, straw man caricature.
...I'd rather hang around and keep the Singularity from being an AI tha
Hello, Less Wrong!
I'm Bill McGrath. I'm 22 years old, Irish, and I found my way here, as with many others, from TVTropes and Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality.
I'm a composer and musician, currently entering the final year of my undergrad degree. I have a strong interest in many other fields - friends of mine who study maths and physics often get grilled for information on their topics! I was a good maths student in school, I still enjoy using maths to solve problems in my other work or just for pleasure, and I still remember most of what I learned. Probablity is the main exception here - it wasn't my strongest area, and I've forgotten a lot of the vocabulary, but it's the next topic I intend to study when I get a chance. This is proving problematic in my understanding of the Bayesian approach, but I'm getting there.
I've been working my way through the core sequences, along with some scattered reading elsewhere on the site. So far, a lot of what I've encountered has been ideas that are familiar to me, and that I try to use when debating or discussing ideas anyway. I've held for a while now that you have to be ready to admit your mistakes, not be afraid of being wrong som...
Hi, I'm Lincoln. I am 25; I live and work in Cambridge, MA. I currently build video games but I'm going to start a Ph.D program in Computer Science at the local university in the fall.
I identified rationality as a thing to be achieved ever since I knew there was a term for it. One of the minor goals I had since I was about 15 was devising a system of morality which fit with my own intuitions but which was consistent under reflection (but not in so many words). The two thought experiments I focused on were abortion and voting. I didn't come up with an answer, but I knew that such a morality was a thing I wanted -- consistency was important to me.
I ran across Eliezer's work 907 days ago reading a Hacker News post about the AI-box experiment, and various other Overcoming Bias posts that were submitted over the years. I didn't immediately follow through on that stuff.
But I became aware of SIAI about 10 months ago, when rms on Hacker News linked an interesting post about the Visiting Fellows program at SIAI.
I think I had a "click" moment: I immediately saw that AI was both an existential risk and major opportunity, and I wanted to work on these things to save the world. I fol...
Hello, I'm Jeff, I found this site via a link on an XKCD forum post, which also included a link to the Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality fan-fic. I read the book first (well, what has been written so far, I just couldn't stop!) and decided that whoever wrote that must be made of pure awesome, and I was excited to see what you all talked about here.
After some perusal, I decided I had to respond to one of the posts, which of course meant I had to sign up. The post used keyboard layouts (QWERTY, etc.) as an example of how to rephrase a question properly in order to answer it in a meaningful way. Posting my opinion ended up challenging some assumptions I had about the QWERTY layout and the Dvorak layout, and I am now three and a half hours into learning the Dvorak layout in order to determine which is actually the better layout (based on things I read it seemed a worthwhile endeavor, instead of too difficult like I assumed).
I would have posted this in Dvorak layout, but I only have half the keys down and it would be really, really slow, so I switched back to QWERTY just for this. QWERTY comes out practically as I think it - Dvorak, not so much yet. The speed with which...
Greetings, fellow thinkers! I'm a 19-year-old undergraduate student at Clemson University, majoring in mathematics (or, as Clemson (unjustifiably) calls it, Mathematical Sciences). I found this blog through Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality about three weeks ago, and I spent those three weeks doing little else in my spare time but reading the Sequences (which I've now finished).
My parents emigrated from the Soviet Union (my father is from Kiev, my mother from Moscow) just months before my birth. They spoke very little English upon their arrival, so they only spoke Russian to me at home, and I picked up English in kindergarten; I consider both to be my native languages, but I'm somewhat more comfortable expressing myself in English. I studied French in high school, and consider myself "conversant", but definitely not fluent, although I intend to study abroad in a Francophone country and become fluent. This last semester I started studying Japanese, and I intend to become fluent in that as well.
My family is Jewish, but none of my relatives practice Judaism. My mother identifies herself as an agnostic, but is strongly opposed to the Abrahamic religions and their co...
I've been an egoist for as long as I can remember
No offense intended, but: If you could take a pill that would prevent all pain from your conscience, and it could be absolutely guaranteed that no one would ever find out, how many twelve-year-olds would you kill for a dollar?
(Perhaps you meant to say that you were mostly egoist, or that your deliberatively espoused moral principles were egoistic?)
PS: Welcome to Less Wrong!
Eliezer, I've been thinking about this a lot. When I backed up and asked myself whether, not why, I realized that
1) I'm no longer sure what "I am an egoist" means, especially given how far my understanding of ethics has come since I decided that, and
2) I derive fuzzies from repeating that back to myself, which strikes me as a warning sign that I'm covering up my own confusion.
I originally wrote this for the origin story thread until I realized it's more appropriate here. So, sorry if it straddles both a bit.
I am, as nearly as I believe can be seen in the present world, an intrinsic rationalist. For example: as a young child I would mock irrationality in my parents, and on the rare occasions I was struck, I would laugh, genuinely, even through tears if they came, because the irrationality of the Appeal to Force made the joke immensely funnier. Most people start out as well-adapted non-rationalists; I evidently started as a maladaptive rationalist.
As an intrinsic (maladaptive) rationalist, I have had an extremely bumpy ride in understanding my fellow man. If I had been born 10 years later, I might have been diagnosed with Asperger's Syndrome. As it was, I was a little different, and never really got on with anyone, despite being well-mannered. A nerd, in other words. Regarding bias, empathic favoritism, willful ignorance, asking questions in which no response will effect subsequent actions or belief confidences, and other peculiarities for which I seem to be an outlier, any knowledge about how to identify and then deal with these peculiarities has been ex...
I suppose it's high time I actually introduced myself.
Hullo LW! I'm Elizabeth Ellis. That's a very common first name and a very common last name, so if you want to google me, I recommend "relsqui" instead. (I'm not a private person, the handle is just more useful for being a consistently recognizable person online.) I'm 24 and in Berkeley, California, USA. No association with the college; I just live here. I'm a cyclist, an omnivore, and a nontheist; none of these are because of moral beliefs.
I'm a high school dropout, which I like telling people after they've met me, because I like fighting the illusion that formal education is the only way to produce intelligent, literate, and articulate people--or rather, that the only reason to drop out is not being one. In mid-August of this year I woke up one morning, thought for a while about things I could do with my life that would be productive and fulfilling, and decided it would be helpful to have a bachelor's degree. I started classes two weeks later. GEs for now, then a transfer into a communication or language program. It's very strange taking classes with people who were in high school four months ago.
My major area of inte...
Greetings, all. Found this site not too long ago, been reading through it in delight. It has truly energized my brain. I've been trying to codify and denote a number of values that I held true to my life and to discussion and to reason and logic, but was having the most difficult time. I was convinced I'd found a wonderful place that could help me when it provided me a link to the Twelve Virtues of Rationality, which neatly and tidily listed out a number of things I'd been striving to enumerate.
My origins in rationality basically originated at a very, very young age, when the things adults said and did didn't make sense. Some of it did, as a matter of fact, make more sense once I'd gotten older - but they could have at least tried to explain it to me - and I found that their successes too often seemed more like luck than having anything to do with their reasons for doing things. I suppose I became a rationalist out of frustration, one could say, at the sheer irrationality of the world around me.
I'm a Christian, and have applied my understanding of Rationality to Christianity. I find it holds up strongly, but am not insulted that not everyone feels that way. This site may be...
My name is Laural, 33-yo female, degree in CS, fetish for EvPsych. Raised Mormon, got over it at 18 or so, became a staunch Darwinist at 25.
I've been reading OvercomingBias on and off for years, but I didn't see this specific site till all the links to the Harry Potter fanfic came about. I had in fact just completed that series in May, so was quite excited to see the two things combined. But I think I wouldn't have registered if I hadn't read the AI Box page, which convinced me that EY was a genius. Personally, I am more interested in life-expansion than FAI. I'm most interested in changing social policy to legalize drugs, I suppose; if people are allowed to put whatever existing substances in their bodies, the substances that don't yet exist have a better chance.
I also found this blog through HP:MoR.
My ultimate social value is freedom, by which I mean the power of each person to control their own life. I believe in something like a utilitarian calculus, where utility is freedom, except that I don't really believe that there is a common scale in which one person's loss of freedom can be balanced by another person's gain. However, I find that freedom is usually very strongly positive-sum on any plausible scale, so this flaw doesn't seem to matter very much.
Of course, freedom in this sense can only be a social value; this leaves it up to each person to decide their own personal values: what they want for their own lives. In my case, I value forming and sustaining friendships in meatspace, often with activities centred around food and shared work, and I also value intellectual endeavours, mostly of an abstract mathematical sort. But this may change with my whims.
I might proselytise freedom here from time to time. There would be no point in proselytising my personal values, however.
Hi all.
I found this site through Methods of Rationality (as I suspect many have, of late). I've been reading through the sequences and archives for a while, and am finally starting to feel up to speed enough to comment here and there.
My name is Sam. I'm a programmer, mostly interested in writing and designing games. Oddly enough, my username derives from my much-neglected blog, which I believe predated this website.
I've always relished discovering that I'm wrong; if there's a better way to consistently improve the accuracy of one's beliefs, I'm not aware of it. So the LW approach makes an awful lot of sense to me, and I'm really enjoying how much concentrated critical thinking is available in the archives.
I'm also polyamorous, and so I'm considering a post or two on how polyamory (and maybe other kinds of alternative sexualities) relates to the practice of rationality. Would there be any interest in that sort of thing? I don't want to drag a pet topic into a place it's unwanted.
Furthermore, I am overfond of parentheses and semicolons. I apologize in advance.
I'm Valerie, 23 and a brand new atheist. I was directed to LW on a (also newly atheist) friend's recommendation and fell in love with it.
Since identifying as an atheist, I've struggled a bit with 'now what?' I feel like a whole new world has opened up to me and there is so much out there that I didn't even know existed. It's a bit overwhelming, but I'm loving the influx of new knowledge. I'm still working to shed old patterns of thinking and work my way into new ones. I have the difficulty of reading something and feeling that I understand it, but not being able to articulate it again (something left over from defending my theistic beliefs, which had no solid basis). I think I just need some practice :)
EDIT: Your link to the series of posts on why LW is generally atheistic is broken. Which makes me sad.
I'm here because of SoullessAutomaton, who is my apartment-mate and long term friend. I am interested in discussing rhetoric and rationality. I have a few questions that I would pose to the group to open up the topic.
1) Are people interested in rhetoric, persuasion, and the systematic study thereof? Does anyone want a primer? (My PhD is in the History and Theory of Rhetoric, so I could develop such a primer.)
2) What would a rationalist rhetoric look like?
3) What would be the goals / theory / overarching observations that would be the drivers behind a rationalist rhetoric?
4) Would a rationalist rhetoric be more ethical than current rhetorics, and if so, why?
5) Can rhetoric ever be fully rational and rationalized, or is the study of how people are persuaded inevitably or inherently a-rational or anti-rational (I would say that rhetoric can be rationalized, but I know too many scholars who would disagree with me here, either explici...
I'm a 24 year old PhD student of molecular biology. I arrived here trying to get at the many worlds vs copenhagen debate as a nonspecialist, and as part of a sustained campaign of reading that will allow me to tell a friend who likes Hegel where to shove it. I'm also here because I wanted to reach a decision about whether I really want to do biology, if not, whether I should quit, and if I leave, what i actually want to do.
Hello. I've been browsing articles that show up on the front page for about a year now. Just recently started going through the sequences and decided it would be a good time to create an account.
Well, as best I can tell my maintainer didn't install the religion patch, so all I'm working with is the testaments of others; but I have seen quite a variety of such testaments. Buddhism and Hinduism have a typology of religious experience much more complex than anything I've seen systematically laid down in mainline Christianity; it's usually expressed in terms unique to the Dharmic religions, but vipassanā for example certainly seems to qualify as an experiential pointer to Buddhist ontology.
If you'd prefer Western traditions, a phrase I've heard kicked around in the neopagan, reconstructionist, and ceremonial magic communities is "unsubstantiated personal gnosis". While that's a rather flippant way of putting it, it also seems to point to something similar to your experiences.
I appreciate Will's contributions in general. Mostly the insane ones.
They remind me of a friend of mine who is absolutely brilliant but has lived his whole life with severe damage to vital parts of the brain.
The impression I have is that calling Crocker's rules being never acting offended or angry at the way people talk to you, with the expectation that you'll get more information if people don't censor themselves out of politeness.
Some of your reactions here are not those I expect from someone under Crocker's rules (who would just ignore anything insulting or offensive).
So maybe what you consider as "Crocker's rules" is what most people here would consider "normal" discussion, so when you call Crocker's rules, people are extra rude.
I would suggest just dropping reference to Crocker's rules, I don't think they're necessary for having a reasonable discussion, and they they put pressure on the people you're talking to to either call Crocker's rules too (giving you carte blanche to be rude to them), otherwise they look uptight or something.
My experience of LW is that:
Dunno if any of that answers your questions.
I would also say that nobody here has come even remotely close to "insult in every conceivable way" as an operating mode.
How do I insult thee? Let me count the ways.
I insult thee to the depth and breadth and height
My mind can reach, when feeling out of sight
For the lack of Reason and the craft of Bayes.
someone's attempt to convey information to me has obvious room for improvement
Do you mean improvement of the information content or the tone? If the former, I think saying "your comment was not informative enough, please explain more" is okay, both publicly and privately. If the latter, I think saying "your comment was not polite enough" is not okay under the spirit of Crocker's rules, neither publicly nor privately, even if the other person has declared Crocker's rules too.
Acts 10:9-16:
On the morrow, as they went on their journey, and drew nigh unto the city, Peter went up upon the housetop to pray about the sixth hour:
And he became very hungry, and would have eaten: but while they made ready, he fell into a trance,
And saw heaven opened, and a certain vessel descending upon him, as it had been a great sheet knit at the four corners, and let down to the earth:
Wherein were all manner of fourfooted beasts of the earth, and wild beasts, and creeping things, and fowls of the air.
And there came a voice to him, Rise, Peter; kill, and eat.
But Peter said, Not so, Lord; for I have never eaten any thing that is common or unclean.
And the voice spake unto him again the second time, What God hath cleansed, that call not thou common.
This was done thrice: and the vessel was received up again into heaven.
If you read the rest of the chapter it's made clear that the dream is a metaphor for God's willingness to accept Gentiles as Christians, rather than a specific message about acceptable foods, but abandoning kashrut presumably follows logically from not requiring new Christians to count as Jews first, so.
(Upon rereading this, my first impression is how much creepier s...
You guys really hate Christians, after all.
The ten people I care about most in the world all happen to be Christians - devout, sincere Christians at that.
Hi, I've been hanging around for several months now and decided to join. My name is John and I found the site (I believe) via a link on CommonSenseAtheism to How to actually change your mind. I read through many of those posts and took notes and resonated with a lot. I loved EY's Twelve Virtues and the Litany of Gendlin.
I'm a graduate in mechanical engineering and work as one today. I don't know that I would call myself a rationalist, but only because I haven't perhaps become one. In other words, I want to be but do not consider myself to be well-versed in rationalist methods and thought compared to posts/comments I read here.
To close, I was brought to this site in a round-about way because I have recently de-converted from Catholicism (which is what took me to CSA). I'm still amidst my "quest" and blog about it HERE. I would say I'm not sure god doesn't exist or that Christianity is false, but the belief is no longer there. I seek to be as certain and justified I can in whatever beliefs I hold. LessWrong has seemed to be a good tool toward that end. I look forward to continuing to learn and want to take this opportunity to begin participating more.
Note: I also post as "Hendy" on several other blogs. We are the same.
Hello!
I work in a semi-technical offshoot of (ducks!) online marketing. I've always had rationalist tendencies, and reading the material on this website has had a "coming home" feeling for me. I appreciate the high level of discourse and the low levels of status-seeking behaviors.
I am female, and I read with interest the discussion on gender, but unfortunately I do not think I can contribute much to that topic, because I have been told repeatedly that I am "not like other women." I certainly don't think it would be a good idea to generalize from my example what other women think or feel (although to be honest the same could be said about my ability to represent the general populace).
I found my way here through the Harry Potter story, which a friend sent to me knowing that I would appreciate the themes. I am enjoying it tremendously.
My name's Axel Glibert. I'm 21, I just finished studying Biology and now I'm going for a teaching job. I found this wonderful site through hp and the methods of rationality and it has been an eyeopener for me.
I've been raised in a highly religious environment but it didn't take very long before I threw that out of the window. Since then I had to make my own moral rules and attempts at understanding how the universe works. My firsts "scientific experiments" were rather ineffective but it caused me to browse through the science section of the local library... and now, more then a decade later, here I am!
I have long thought I was the only one to so openly choose Science over Religion (thinking even scientists were secretly religious because it was the "right thing to do") but then I found Less Wrong filled with like-minded people! For the past 3 months I've been reading through the core sequences on this site and now I've finally made an account. I'm still too intimidated by the sheer brilliance of some of the threads here to actually post but that's just more motivation for me to study on my own.
I'm Floris Nool a 24 year old recently graduated Dutch ex-student. I came across this site while reading Harry's new rational adventures, which I greatly enjoy by the way. I must say I'm intrigued by several of the subjects being talked about here. Although not everything makes sense at first and I'm still working my through the immense amounts of interesting posts on this site, I find myself endlessly scrolling through posts and comments.
The last few years I increasingly find myself trying to understand things, why they are like they are. Why I act like I do etc. Reading about the greater scientific theories and trying to relate to them in everyday life. While I do not understand as much as I want to, and probably never will seeing the amounts of information and theories out there, I hope to come to greater understanding of basically everything.
It's great to see so many people talking about these subjects, as in daily life hardly anyone seems to think about it like I do. Which can be rather frustrating when trying to talk about what I find interesting subjects.
I hope to be able to some day contribute to the community as I see other posters do, but until I feel comfortable enough about my understanding of everything going on here I will stay lurking for a while. Only having discovered the site two days ago doesn't exactly help.
I recently found Less Wrong through Eliezer's Harry Potter fanfic, which has become my second favorite book. Thank you so much Eliezer for reminding my how rich my Art can be.
I was also delighted to find out (not so surprisingly) that Eliezer was an AI researcher. I have, over the past several months, decided to change my career path to AGI. So many of these articles have been helpful.
I have been a rationalist since I can remember. But I was raised as a Christian, and for some reason it took me a while to think to question the premise of God. Fortunately as soon as I did, I rejected it. Then it was up to me to 1) figure out how to be immortal and 2) figure out morality. I'll be signing up for cryonics as soon as I can afford it. Life is my highest value because it is the terminal value; it is required for any other value to be possible.
I've been reading this blog every day since I've found it, and hope to get constant benefit from it. I'm usually quiet, but I suspect the more I read, the more I'll want to comment and post.
Hello! I'm Sam. I'm 17, a newly minted high school graduate, and I'll be heading off to Reed College in Portland, Oregon next month.
I discovered Less Wrong through a link (whose origin I no longer remember) to "A Fable of Science and Politics" a couple of months ago. The post was rather striking, and the site's banner was alluring, so I clicked on it. The result, over the past couple of months, has been a massive accumulation of bookmarks (18 directly from Less Wrong at the time of this writing) accompanied by an astonishing amount of insight.
This place is probably the most intellectually stimulating site I've ever found on the internet, and I'm very much looking forward to discovering more posts, as well as reading through the ones I've stored up. I have, until now, mostly read bits and pieces that I've seen on the main page or followed links to, partially because I haven't had time and partially because some of the posts can be intimidatingly academic (I don't have the math and science background to understand some of what Eliezer writes about), but I've made this account and plan to delve into the Sequences shortly.
To some degree, I think I've always been a rationa...
Hi. I'm Cole from Maryland. I found this blog through a list of "greatest blogs of the year." I've forgot who published that list.
I'm in my 23rd year. I value happiness and work to spread it to others. I've been reading this blog for about a month. I enjoy reading blogs like this, because I'm searching for a sustainable lifestyle to start after college.
Cheers
My name is Taiyo Inoue. I am a 32, male, father of a 1 year old son, married, and a math professor. I enjoy playing the acoustic guitar (American primitive fingerpicking), playing games, and soaking up the non-poisonous bits of the internet.
I went through 12 years of math study without ever really learning that probability theory is the ultimate applied math. I played poker for a bit during the easy money boom for fun and hit on basic probability theory which the 12 year old me could have understood, but I was ignorant of the Bayesian framework for epistemology until I was 30 years old. This really annoys me.
I blame my education for leaving me ignorant about something so fundamental, but mostly I blame myself for not trying harder to learn about fundamentals on my own.
This site is really good for remedying that second bit. I have a goal to help fix the first bit -- I think we call it "raising the sanity waterline".
As a father, I also want to teach my son so he doesn't have the same regret and annoyance at my age.
I go by Clarisse and I'm a feminist, sex-positive educator who has delivered workshops on both sexual communication and BDSM to a variety of audiences, including New York’s Museum of Sex, San Francisco’s Center for Sex and Culture, and several Chicago universities. I created and curated the original Sex+++ sex-positive documentary film series at Chicago’s Jane Addams Hull-House Museum; I have also volunteered as an archivist, curator and fundraiser for that venerable BDSM institution, the Leather Archives & Museum. Currently, I'm working on HIV mitigation in southern Africa. I blog at clarissethorn.wordpress.com and Twitter at @clarissethorn.
Besides sex, other interests include gaming, science fiction and fantasy, and housing cooperatives.
I've read some posts here that I thought had really awful attitudes about sexuality and BDSM in particular, so I'm sure I'll be posting about those. I would like it if people were more rational about sex, inasmuch as we can be.
But my dilemma is that Chris Langan is the smartest known living man, which makes it really hard for me to shrug the CTMU off as nonsense.
Eh, I'm smart too. Looks to me like you were right the first time and need to have greater confidence in yourself.
Ignoring the more obvious jokes people make in introduction posts: Hi. My name is Robin. I grew up in the Eastern Time Zone of the United States, and have lived in the same place essentially all my life. I was homeschooled by secular parents - one didn't discuss religion and the other was agnostic - with my primary hobby being the reading of (mostly) speculative fiction of (mostly) quite high quality. (Again, my parent's fault - when I began searching out on my own, I was rather less selective.) The other major activity of my childhood was participation in the Boy Scouts of America.
I entered community college at the age of fifteen with an excellent grounding in mathematics, a decent grounding in physics, superb fluency with the English language (both written and spoken), and superficial knowledge of most everything else. After earning straight As for three years, I applied to four-year universities, and my home state university offered me a full ride. At present, I am a graduate student in mechanical engineering at the same institution.
In the meantime, I have developed an affection for weblogs, web comics, and online chess, much to the detriment of my sleep schedule and work ethic....
Hey everyone,
My name is Owen, and I'm 17. I read HPMOR last year, but really got into the Sequences and additional reading (GEB, Thinking Fast and Slow, Influence) around this summer.
I'm interested in time management, with respect to dealing with distractions, especially with respect to fighting akrasia. So I'm trying to use what I know about how my own brain operates to create a suite of internalized beliefs, primers, and defense strategies for when I get off-track (or stopping before I get to that point).
Personally, I'm connected with a local environme...
Wikipedia and Google seem to think Eliezer is the authority on Crocker's Rules. Quoting Eliezer on sl4 via Wikipedia:
Anyone is allowed to call you a moron and claim to be doing you a favor.
Also, from our wiki:
The underlying assumption is that rudeness is sometimes necessary for effective conveyance of information, if only to signal a lack of patience or tolerance: after all, knowing whether the speaker is becoming angry or despondent is useful rational evidence.
Looking hard for another source, something called the DoWire Wiki has this unsourced:
...
I know Will Newsome in real life. If a means of arbitrating this bet is invented, I will identify AspiringKnitter as being him or not by visual or voice for a small cut of the stakes. (If it doesn't involve using Skype, telephone, or an equivalent, and it's not dreadfully inconvenient, I'll do it for free.)
More sex does not have to mean more casual sex. There are lots of people in committed relationships (marriages) that would like to have more-similar sex drives. Nuns wouldn't want their libido increased, but it's not only for the benefit of the "playahs" either.
Also, I think the highest-voted comment ("I don't think that any relationship style is the best (...) However, I do wish that people were more aware of the possibility of polyamory (...)") is closer to the consensus than something like "everyone should have as many partners ...
Hello Lesswrong
I am a nameless, ageless, genderless internet-being who may sometimes act like a 22 year old male from canada. I have always been quite rational and consciously aiming to become more rational, though I had never read any actual discussion of rationality, unless you count cat-v. I did have some possibly wrong ideas that I protected with anti-epistemology, but that managed to collapse on its own recently.
I got linked to lesswrong from reddit. I didn't record the details so don't ask. I do remember reading a few lesswrong articles and thinking ...
Hello LessWrong!
My name is Michelle. I am from the United States and am entering college this August. I am a graphic design student who is also interested in public speaking. I was lead to this site one day while browsing fanfiction. I am an avid reader and spend a good percentage of my life reading novels and other literature. I read HPMOR and found the story intriguing and the theories very interesting. When I finally reached the end, I read the author's page and realized that I could find more information on the ideas presented in the book. Naturally, ...
Hello Less wrong.
I've been reading Yudkowsky for a while now. I'm a philosophy major from NJ and he's been quite popular around here since I showed some of my friends three worlds collide. I am here because I think I can offer this forum new and well considered views on cognition, computability, epistemology, ontology, valid inference in general and also have my views kicked around a bit. Hopefully our mutual kicking around of each others views will toughen them up for future kicking battles.
I have studied logic at high levels, and have an intricate und...
Hi
Didn't realise that this thread existed, so this 'hello' is after 20 or so posts. Oh well! I found Less Wrong because my brother recommended TVtropes, that linked to Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality, and THAT led me back here. I've now recommended this site to my brother, completing the circle.
I've always been interested in rationality, I guess: I wouldn't identify any particular point of 'becoming a rationalist', though I've had times where I've come across ideas that help me be more accurate. Including some on here, actually. There's a secon...
Hi everyone!
I found this blog by clicking a link on Eliezer's site...which I found after seeing his name in a transhumanist mailing list...which I subscribed to after reading Ray Kurzweil's The Singularity is Near when I was fifteen. I found Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality at the same time, and I've now successfully addicted my 16-year-old brother as well.
I'm 19 and I'm studying nursing in Ottawa. I work as a lifeguard and swim instructor at a Jewish Community Centre. (I'm not Jewish.) I sing in a girls' choir at an Anglican church. (I'm not C...
Er. For example, it is really hard to communicate here without being totally literal! And people don't get my jokes!:-)
I wasn't complaining. I was trying to point out that the risk of being discriminated against for having Aspergers Syndrome here was very low given the high number of autism spectrum commenters here and the general climate of the site. I thought I was making a humorous point about the uniqueness of Less Wrong, like "We're so different from the rest of the internet; we discriminate against neurotypicals! Take that rest of the world!&quo...
Hi there,
My name is Lachlan, 25 years old, and I too am a computer programmer. I found less wrong via Eliezer's site; having been linked there by a comment on Charles Stross's blog, if I recall correctly.
I've read through a lot of the LW backlog and generally find it all very interesting, but haven't yet taken the time and effort to try to apply the useful seeming guidelines to my life and evaluate the results. I blame this on having left my job recently, and feeling that I have enough change in my life right now. I worry that this excuse will metamorphose...
Hi, everyone, you can call me Gigi. I'm a Mechanical Engineering student with a variety of interests ranking among everything from physics to art (unfortunately, I know more about the latter than the former). I've been reading LW frequently and for long sessions for a couple of weeks now.
I was attracted to LW primarily because of the apparent intelligence and friendliness of the community, and the fact that many of the articles illuminated and structured my previous thoughts about the world (I will not bother to name any here, many are in the Sequences).
Wh...
Hi, I`m Michèle. I'm 22 years old and studying biology in Germany. My parents are atheists and so am I.
I stumbled upon this blog, started reading and couldn't stop reading. Nearly every topic is very interesting for me and I'm really glad I found people to talk about these things!
Sometimes I find myself over emotional and unable to get the whole picture of situations. I'm trying to work on that and I hope I could get some insight reading this blog.
Hello.
My name is Dan, and I'm a 30 year old software engineer living in Maryland. I was a mostly lurking member of the Extropian mailing list back in the day and I've been following the progress of the SIAI sporadically since it's founding. I've made a few donations, but nothing terribly significant.
I've been an atheist for half my life now, and as I've grown older I've tended more and more to rational thinking. My wife recently made a comment that she specifically uses rational argument with me much more so than anyone else she has to deal with, even ...
Name: Karl Smith
Location: Raleigh, North Carolina
Born: 1978
Education: Phd Economics
Occupation: Professor - UNC Chapel Hill
I've always been interested in rationality and logic but was sidetracked for many (12+) years after becoming convinced that economics was the best way to improve the lives of ordinary humans.
I made it to Less Wrong completely by accident. I was into libertarianism which lead me to Bryan Caplan which lead me Robin Hanson (just recently). Some of Robin's stuff convinced me that Cryonics was a good idea. I searched for Cryonics and found ...
Hi all, my name's Drew. I stumbled upon the site from who-knows-where last week and must've put in 30-40 hours of reading already, so suffice to say I've found the writing/discussions quite enjoyable so far. I'm heavily interested in theories of human behavior on both a psychological and moral level, so most of the subject matter has been enjoyable. I was a big Hofstader fan a few years back as well, so the AI and consciousness discussions are interesting as well.
Anyway, thought I'd pop in and say hi, maybe I'll take part in some conversations soon. Looks like a great thing you've got going here.
Hi, I'm Hrishi, 26, male. I work in air pollution modelling in London. I'm also doing a part-time PhD.
I am an atheist but come from a very religious family background.
When I was 15, I once cried uncontrollably and asked to see God. If there is indeed such a beautiful supreme being then why didn't my family want to meet Him? I was told that their faith was weak and only the greatest sages can see God after a lot of self-afflicted misery. So, I thought nevermind.
I've signed up for cryonics. You should too, or it'll just be 3 of us from LW when we wake up on...
Atheist by default, rationalist by more recent inclination and training. I found OB via Stumbleupon and followed the yellow brick road to Less Wrong. In the spare time left by schoolwork and OB/LW, I do art, write, cook, and argue with those of my friends who still put up with it.
ugly little lump.
Will is good-looking, normal-sized, and not at all lumpy. If you must insult people, can you do it in a less wrong way?
And I would never have dreamed of the stupidity until someone did it, but someone actually interpreted metaphors from Proverbs literally and concluded that "her husband is praised at the city gates" actually means "women should go to the city limits and hold up signs saying that their husbands are awesome"
As a semi-militant atheist, I feel compelled to point out that, from my perspective, all interpretations of Proverbs as a practical guide to modern life look about equally silly...
The boring explanation is that Laoch was taught as the feet of PZ Myers and Hitchens, who operate purely in places open for debate (atheist blogs are not like dinner tables); talk about the arguments of religious people not to them, but to audiences already sympathetic to atheism, and thus care little about principles of charity; and have a beef with religion-as-harmful-organization (e.g. "Hassidic Judaism hurts queers!") and rather often with religious-people-as-outgroup-members (e.g. "Sally says abortion is murder because she's trying to manipulate me!"), which interferes with their beef with religion-as-reasoning-mistake (e.g. "Sadi thinks he can derive knowledge in ways that violate thermodynamics!").
The reading-too-much-HPMOR explanation is that Laoch is an altruistic Slytherin, who wants Knitter to think: "This is a good bunch. Not only are most people nice, but they can swiftly punish jerks. And there are such occasional jerks - I don't have to feel silly about expecting a completely different reaction than I got, it was because bad apples are noisier.".
I would have thought there ain't no such critter as "too much MoR", but after seeing that theory... ;)
I'd be interested to hear more about your understanding of what a computer is, that drives your confidence that being turned into one is a bad thing.
Relatedly, how confident are you that God will never make a computer that acts like you and thinks it is you? How did you arrive at that confidence?
I'm going to scoop TheOtherDave on this topic, I hope he doesn't mind :-/
But first of all, who do you mean by "an em" ? I think I know the answer, but I want to make sure.
If it thought it was me, and they thought it was me, but I was already dead, that would be really bad.
From my perspective, a machine that thinks it is me, and that behaves identically to myself, would, in fact, be myself. Thus, I could not be "already dead" under that scenario, until someone destroys the machine that comprises my body (which they could do with my biological body, as well).
There are two scenarios I can think of that help illustrate my point.
1). Let's pretend that you and I know each other relatively well, though only through Less Wrong. But tomorrow, aliens abduct me and replace me with a machine that makes the same exact posts as I normally would. If you ask this replica what he ate for breakfast, or how he feels about walks on the beach, or whatever, it will respond exactly as I would have responded. Is there any test you can think of that will tell you whether you're talking to the real Bugmaster, or the replica ? If the answer is "no", then how do you know th...
That's a REALLY good response.
An em would be a computer program meant to emulate a person's brain and mind.
From my perspective, a machine that thinks it is me, and that behaves identically to myself, would, in fact, be myself. Thus, I could not be "already dead" under that scenario, until someone destroys the machine that comprises my body (which they could do with my biological body, as well).
If you create such a mind that's just like mine at this very moment, and take both of us and show the construct something, then ask me what you showed the construct, I won't know the answer. In that sense, it isn't me. If you then let us meet each other, it could tell me something.
If you ask this replica what he ate for breakfast, or how he feels about walks on the beach, or whatever, it will respond exactly as I would have responded. Is there any test you can think of that will tell you whether you're talking to the real Bugmaster, or the replica ? If the answer is "no", then how do you know that you aren't talking to the replica at this very moment ? More importantly, why does it matter ?
Because this means I could believe that Bugmaster is comfortable and able to...
If it helps, I've read Nagel, and would have gotten the bat allusion. (Dan Dennett does a very entertaining riff on "What is it like to bat a bee?" in response.)
But I consider the physics of qualia to be kind of irrelevant to the conversation we're having.
I mean, I'm willing to concede that in order for a computer program to be a person, it must be able to feel things in italics, and I'm happy to posit that there's some kind of constraint -- label it X for now -- such that only X-possessing systems are capable of feeling things in italics.
Now, maybe the physics underlying X is such that only systems made of protoplasm can possess X. This seems an utterly unjustified speculation to me, and no more plausible than speculating that only systems weighing less than a thousand pounds can possess X, or only systems born from wombs can possess X, or any number of similar speculations. But, OK, sure, it's possible.
So what? If it turns out that a computer has to be made of protoplasm in order to possess X, then it follows that for an upload to be able to feel things in italics, it has to be an upload running on a computer made of protoplasm. OK, that's fine. It's just an engineer...
Hello, Less Wrong.
I am Russian, atheistic, 27, trying to be rational.
Initially I came here to read a through explanation of Bayes theorem, but noticed that LessWrong contains a lot more than that and decided to stay for a while.
I am really pleased by quality of material and pleasantly surprised by quality of comments. It is rare to see useful comments on the Internet.
I am going to read at least some sequences first and comment if I have something to say. Though, I know I WILL be sidetracked by HP:MoR and "Three worlds collide". Well, my love for SF always got me.
Salutations, Less Wrong.
I'm an undergraduate starting my third year at the University of Toronto (in Toronto, Ontario, Canada), taking the Software Engineer specialist program in Computer Science.
I found Less Wrong through a friend, who found it through Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality, who found that through me, and I found HP: MoR through a third friend. I'm working my way through the archive of Less Wrong posts (currently in March of 2009).
On my rationalist origins: One of my parents has a not-insignificant mental problem that result in subtl...
I'm 17 and I'm from Australia.
I've always been interested in science, learning, and philosophy. I've had correct thinking as a goal in my life since reading a book by John Stossel when I was 13.
I first studied philosophy at school in grade 10, when I was 14 and 15. I loved the mind/body problem, and utilitarianism was the coolest thing ever. I had great fun thinking about all these things, and was fairly good at it. I gave a speech about the ethics of abortion last year which I feel really did strike to the heart of the matter, and work as a good use of ra...
Hello, people.
I first found Less Wrong when I was reading sci-fi stories on the internet and stumbled across Three Worlds Collide. As someone who places a high value on the ability to make rational decisions, I decided that this site is definitely relevant to my interests. I started reading through the sequences a few months ago, and I recently decided to make an account so that I could occasionally post my thoughts in the comments. I generally only post things when I think I have something particularly insightful to say, so my posts tend to be infrequent...
Okay. Demographics. Boring stuff. Just skip to the next paragraph. I’m a masters student in mathematics (hopefully soon-to-be PhD student in economics). During undergrad, I majored in Biology, Economics and Math, and minored in Creative Writing (and nearly minored in Chemistry, Marine Science, Statistics and PE) … I’ll spare you the details, but most of those you won’t see on my resume for various reasons. Think: Master of None, not Omnidisciplinary Scientist.
My life goal is to write a financially self-sustainable computer game… for reasons I’ll keep secre...
Hi LW,
My name's Dan LaVine. I forget exactly how I got linked here, but I haven't been able to stop following internal links since.
I'm not an expert in anything, but I have a relatively broad/shallow education across mathematics and the sciences and a keen interest in philosophical problems (not quite as much interest in traditional approaches to the problems). My tentative explorations of these problems are broadly commensurate with a lot of the material I've read on this site so far. Maybe that means I'm exposing myself to confirmation bias, but so ...
Hello, community. I'm another recruit from Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality. After reading the first few chapters and seeing that it lacked the vagueness, unbending archetypes, and overt because the author says so theme that usually drives me away from fiction, then reading Less Wrong's (Eliezer's?) philosophy of fanfiction, I proceeded to read through the Sequences.
After struggling with the question of when I became a rationalist, I think the least wrong answer is that I just don't remember. I both remember less of my childhood than others seem...
Huh, I guess I should have come here earlier...
I'm Lorenzo, 31, from Madrid, Spain (but I'm Italian). I'm an evolutionary psychologist, or try to be, working on my PhD. I'm also doing a Master's Degree in Statistics, in which I discovered (almost by accident) the Bayesian approach. As someone with a longstanding interest in making psychology become a better science, I've found this blog a very good place for clarifying ideas.
I've been a follower of Less Wrong after reading Eliezer's essays on Bayesian reasoning some 3-4 months ago. I've known the Bayes t...
Bueno! I'm Jason from San Antonio, Texas. Nice to say 'hi' to all you nice people! (Nice, also, to inflate the number of comments for this particular post - give the good readers of Less Wrong an incrementally warmer feeling of camaraderie.)
I've been reading Overcoming Bias and Less Wrong for over a year since I found a whole bunch of discussions on quantum mechanics. I've stayed for the low, low cost intellectual gratification.
I (actually, formally) study physics and math, and read these blogs to the extent that I feel smarter...also, because the admitted...
Hi everyone!
I'm graduating law school in May 2010, and then going to work in consumer law at a small firm in San Francisco. I'm fascinated by statistical political science, space travel, aikido, polyamory, board games, and meta-ethics.
I first realized that I needed to make myself more rational when I bombed an online confidence calibration test about 6 years ago; it asked me to provide 95% confidence intervals for 100 different pieces of numerical trivia (e.g. how many nukes does China have, how many counties are in the U.S., how many species of spiders a...
Hello All,
my name is Markus, and just decided, after, well, years? of lurk-jumping from sl4 to OvercomingBias to LessWrong that maybe I should participate in the one or another discussion; not doing so seems to lead to constant increase of things I have a feeling I know but actually fall flat on the first occasion of another person posing a question.
The process of finding to (then non-existing) LW started during senior high, when I somehow got interested into philosophy, soon enough into AI. The interest in AI lead to interest in Weiqi (Chess was publicly ...
However intelligent he is, he fails to present his ideas so as to gradually build a common ground with lay readers. "If you're so smart, how come you ain't convincing?"
The "intelligent design" references on his Wikipedia bio are enough to turn me away. Can you point us to a well-regarded intellectual who has taken his work seriously and recommends his work? (I've used that sort of bridging tactic at least once, Dennett convincing me to read Julian Jaynes.)
I found OB through Marginal Revolution, which then led to LW. A few here know me from my previous job as a professional Magic: The Gathering player and writer and full member of the Competitive Conspiracy. That job highly rewarded the rationality I already had and encouraged its development, as does my current one which unfortunately I can't say much about here but which gives me more than enough practical reward to keep me coming back even if I wasn't fascinated ...
Hello, my friends. I'm a brazilian man, fully blind and gay...
I knew Fanfiction.net, HP MOR and LessWrong. I hope to learn more :)
TL;DR: I found LW through HPMoR, read the major sequences, read stuff by other LWers including the Luminosity series, and lurked for six months before signing up.
My name, as you can see above if you don't have the anti-kibitzing script, Daniel. My story of how I came to self-identify as a rationalist, and then how I later came to be a rationalist, breaks down into several parts. I don't remember the order of all of them.
Since well before I can remember (and I have a fairly good long-term memory), I've been interested in mathematics, and later science. One ...
Hey, I've been an LW lurker for about a year now, and I think it's time to post here. I'm a cryonicist, rationalist and singularity enthusiast. I'm currently working as a computer engineer and I'm thinking maybe there is more I can do to promote rationality and FAI. LW is an incredible resource. I have a mild fear that I don't have enough rigorous knowledge about rationality concepts to contribute anything useful to most discussion.
LW has changed my life in a few ways but the largest are becoming a cryonicist and becoming polyamorous (naturally leaned toward this, though). I feel like I am in a one-way friendship with EY, does anyone else feel like that?
I used to be an atheist before realizing that was incorrect. I wasn't upset about that; I had been wrong, I stopped being wrong. Is that enough?
I am a video game developer. I find most of this site fairly interesting albeit once in a while I disagree with description of some behaviour as irrational, or the explanation projected upon that behaviour (when I happen to see a pretty good reason for this behaviour, perhaps strategic or as matter of general policy/cached decision).
The general impression of the Book of Job seems to be to lower people's opinion of God rather than raise their opinion of trolling.
I hope you're not seeing the options as "keep up with all the threads of this conversation simultaneously" or "quit LW". It's perfectly OK to leave things hanging and lurk for a while. (If you're feeling especially polite, you can even say that you're tapping out of the conversation for now.)
(Hmm, I might add that advice to the Welcome post...)
Please don't consider this patronizing but... the writing style of this comment is really cute.
I think you broke whatever part of my brain evaluates people's signalling. It just gave up and decided your writing is really cute. I really have no idea what impression to form of you; the experience was so unusual that I felt I had to comment.
Thanks to your priming now I can't see "AspiringKnitter" without mentally replacing it with "AspiringKittens" and a mental image of a Less Wrong meetup of kittens who sincerely want to have better epistemic practices. Way to make the world a better place.
This is the internet. Nothing anyone says on the internet is ever going away, even if some of us really wish it could. /nitpick
You would be surprised... If it weren't for the internet archive much information would have already been lost. Some modern websites are starting to use web design techniques (ajax-loaded content) that break such archive services.
"I see that you're trying to extrapolate human volition. Would you like some help ?" converts the Earth into computronium
Welcome! And congratulations for creating what's probably the longest and most interesting introduction thread of all time (I haven't read all the introductions threads, though).
I've read all your posts here. I now have to update my belief about rationality among christians: so long, the most "rational" I'd found turned out to be nothing beyond a repetitive expert in rationalization. Most others are sometimes relatively rational in most aspects of life, but choose to ignore the hard questions about the religion they profess (my own parents fall i...
Welcome to LessWrong. Our goal is to learn how to achieve our goals better. One method is to observe the world and update our beliefs based on what we see (You'd think this would be an obvious thing to do, but history shows that it isn't so). Another method we use is to notice the ways that humans tend to fail at thinking (i.e. have cognitive bias).
Anyway, I hope you find those ideas useful. Like many communities, we are a diverse bunch. Each of our ultimate goals likely differs, but we recognize that the world is far from how any of us want it to be,...
Welcome to Less Wrong.
I don't think much people here hate Christians. At least I don't. I'll just speak for myself (even if I think my view is quite shared here) : I have a harsh view on religions themselves, believing they are mind-killing, barren and dangerous (just open an history book), but that doesn't mean I hate the people who do believe (as long as they don't hate us atheists). I've christian friends, and I don't like them less because of their religion. I'm a bit trying to "open their mind" because I believe that knowing and accepting th...
Salutations, LessWrong!
I am Daniel Peverley, I lurked for a few months and joined not too long ago. I was first introduced to this site via HPatMOR, my first and so far only foray into the world of fan-fiction. I've been raised as a mormon, and I've been a vague unbeliever for a few years, but the information on this site really solidified the doubts and problems I had with my religion. Just knowing how to properly label common logical fallacies has been vastly helpful in my life, and a few of the posts on social dynamics have likewise been of great uti...
Hi, I've been lurking on Less Wrong for a few months now, making a few comments here and there, but never got around to introducing myself. Since I'm planning out an actual post at the moment, I figured I should tell people where I'm coming from.
I'm a male 30-year-old optical engineer in Sydney, Australia. I grew up in a very scientific family and have pretty much always assumed I had a scientific career ahead of me, and after a couple of false starts, it's happened and I couldn't ask for a better job.
Like many people, I came to Less Wrong from TVTropes vi...
Hello everybody, I'm Stefano from Italy. I'm 30, and my story about becoming a rationalist is quite tortuous... as a kid I was raised as a christian, but not strictly so: my only obligation was to attend mass every sunday morning. At the same time since young age I was fond of esoteric and scientific literature... With hindsight, I was a strange kid: by the age of 13 I already knew quite a lot about such things as the Order of the Golden Dawn or General Relativity... My fascination with computer and artificial intelligence begun approximately at the same a...
I started posting a while ago (and was lurking for a while beforehand), and only today found this post.
My parents were both science teachers, and I got an education in traditional rationality basically since birth (I didn't even know it had such a name as "traditional rationality", I assumed it was just how you were supposed to think). I've always used that experimental mindset in order to understand people and the rest of the universe. I'm an undergrad in the Plan II honors program at the University of Texas at Austin, majoring in Chemistry Pre...
Jeff Kaufman. Working as a programmer doing computational linguistics in the boston area. Found "less wrong" twice: first through the intuitive explanation of bayes' theorem and then again recently through "hp and the methods of rationality". I value people's happiness, valuing that of those close to me more than that of strangers, but I value strangers' welfare enough that I think I have an obligation to earn as much as I can and live on as little as I can so I can give more to charity.
G'day LW Im an Aussie currently studying at the Australian National University in Canberra. My name is Sam and i should point out that the 'G'day' is just for fun, most Australians never use that phase and it kinda makes me cringe.
At at this very moment i'm trying to finish my thesis on the foundations of inductive reasoning, which i guess is pretty relevant to this community. A big part of my thesis is to translate a lot of very technical mathematics regarding Bayesianism and Sollomonoff induction into philosophical and intuitive explanations, so this wh...
Hey Lesswrong! I'm just going to ramble for a second..
I like art, social sciences, philosophy, gaming, rationality and everything that falls in between. Examples include Go, Evolutionary Psychology, Mafia (aka Werewolves), Improvisation, Drugs and Debate.
See you if I see you!
Heikki, 30, Finnish student of computer engineering. Found Less Wrong by via the IRC-channel of the Finnish Transhumanist Association, which was found by random surfing ("Oh, there's a name for what I am?")
As for becoming a rationalist, I'd say the recipe was no friends and a good encyclopedia... Interest in ideas, unhindered by the baggage of standard social activities. One of the most influential single things was probably finding evolution quite early on. I remember (might be a false memory) having thought it would sure make sense if a horse'...
Hi everyone.
My name is Alan Godfrey.
I am fascinated by rational debate and logical arguments, and I appear to have struck gold in finding this site! I am the first to admit my own failings in these areas but am always willing to learn and grow.
I'm a graduate of mathematics from Trinity Hall, Cambridge University and probability and statistics have always been my areas of expertise - although I find numbers so much more pleasant to play with than theorems and proofs so bear with me!
I'm also a passive member of Mensa. While most of it does not interest me th...
My career as a rationalist began when I started doing tech support, and realized the divide between successful troubleshooting and what most customers tried to do. I think the key to "winning" is to challenge your assumptions about how to win, and what winning is. I think that makes me an instrumental rationalist, but I'm not quite sure I understand the term. I'm here because OB and ...
This community is too young to have veterans. Since this is the first such post, I think we should all be encouraged to introduce ourselves.
Thanks for doing this!
I'm a 20 year old mathematics/music double major at NYU. Mainly here because I want to learn how to wear Vibrams without getting self conscious about it.
We were talking about applying the metaphysics system to making an AI earlier in IRC, and the symbol grounding problem came up there as a basic difficulty in binding formal reasoning systems to real-time actions. It doesn't look like this was mentioned here before.
I'm assuming I'd want to actually build an AI that needs to deal with symbol grounding, that is, it needs to usefully match some manner of declarative knowledge it represents in its internal state to the perceptions it receives from the outside world and to the actions it performs on it. Given th...
There might not be many people here to who are sufficiently up to speed on philosophical metaphysics to have any idea what a Wheeler-style reality theory, for example, is. My stereotypical notion is that the people at LW have been pretty much ignoring philosophy that isn't grounded in mathematics, physics or cognitive science from Kant onwards, and won't bother with stuff that doesn't seem readable from this viewpoint. The tricky thing that would help would be to somehow translate the philosopher-speak into lesswronger-speak. Unfortunately this'd require some fluency in both.
Hmm, that doesn't sound right. I don't want to make celibate people uncomfortable, I just want to have more casual sex myself. Also I have a weaker altruistic wish that people who aren't "getting any" could "get some" without having to tweak their looks (the beauty industry) or their personality (the pickup scene). There could be many ways to make lots of unhappy people happier about sex and romance without tweaking your libido. Tweaking libido sounds a little pointless to me anyway, because PUA dogma (which I mostly agree with) predicts that people will just spend the surplus libido on attractive partners and leave unattractive ones in the dust, like they do today.
It's not exactly rigorous, but you could try leaving bagels at Christian and Wiccan gatherings of approximately the same size and see how many dollars you get back.
So... voicing disagreement boldly is trolling, voicing it nervously is trolling and trying to prevent being called out. Signalling distance from the group is trolling and accusations of hive mind, signalling group membership is trolling and going "Seriously, I'm one of you guys". Joking about the image a group idea's have, in the same way the group itself does, is straw-manning and caricature, seriously worrying about those ideas is damsel-in-distress crap.
Deliberate, active straw manning sarcasm for the purpose of giving insult and conveying ...
my default state matches the negative symptoms of schizophrenia..."happiness" as such is not an emotion I experience very much at all
Have you sought professional help in the past? If not, do nothing else until you take some concrete step in that direction. This is an order from your decision theory.
Well, here's me doing my part: I don't declare Crocker's rules, and am unlikely to ever do so. Others can if they wish.
Yes, where names need to be changed. [God] will be sufficient to confuse me as to whether it's "the LORD" or "Allah" in the original source material. There might be a problem with substance in very different holy books where I might be able to guess the religion just by what they're saying (like if they talk about reincarnation or castes, I'll know they're Hindu or Buddhist). I hope anyone finding quotes will avoid those, of course.
Consider three people: Sam, Ethel, and Doug.
I've known Sam since we were kids together, we enjoy each others' company and act in one another's interests. I've known Doug since we were kids together, we can't stand one another and act against one another's interests. I've never met Ethel in my life and know nothing about her; she lives on the other side of the planet and has never heard of me.
It seems fair to say that Sam is my friend, and Doug is my enemy. But what about Ethel?
If I believe "anyone who isn't my enemy is my friend," then I can eval...
Suppose the multiple words interpretation is true. Now I flip a fair quantum coin, and kill you if it comes up heads. Then in 50% of the worlds you still live, so by your reasoning, nobody has died. All that changes is the amplitude of your existence.
Well, maybe. But there is a whole universe full of people who will never speak to you again and are left to grieve over your body.
... I'd rather hang around and keep the Singularity from being an AI that forcibly exterminates all morality and all people who don't agree with Eliezer Yudkowsky.
Upvote for courage, and I'd give a few more if I could. (Though you might consider rereading some of EY's CEV posts, because I don't think you've accurately summarized his intentions.)
You guys really hate Christians, after all.
I don't hate Christians. I was a very serious one for most of my life. Practically everyone I know and care about IRL is Christian.
I don't think LW deserves all the credit for my deconversion, but it definitely hastened the event.
Welcome!
I'm Christian and female and don't want to be turned into an immortal computer-brain-thing that acts more like Eliezer thinks it should.
Only one of those is really a reason for me to be nervous, and that's because Christianity has done some pretty shitty things to my people. But that doesn't mean we have nothing in common! I don't want to act the way EY thinks I should, either. (At least, not merely because it's him that wants it.)
You guys really hate Christians, after all. (Am I actually allowed to be here or am I banned for my religion?)
I...
"Only one of those is really a reason for me to be nervous, and that's because Christianity has done some pretty shitty things to my people."
Oh, don't be such a martyr. "My people..." please. You do not represent "your people" and you aren't their authority.
The point has been missed. Deep breath, paper-machine.
Nearly any viewpoint is capable of and has done cruel things to others. No reason to unnecessarilly highlight this fact and dramatize the Party of Suffering. This was an intro thread by a newcomer - not a reason to point to you and "your" people. They can speak for themselves.
To the extent that you're saying that the whole topic of Christian/queer relations was inappropriate for an intro thread, I would prefer you'd just said that. I might even agree with you, though I didn't find paper-machine's initial comment especially problematic.
To the extent that you're saying that paper-machine should not treat the prior poor treatment of members of a group they belong to, by members of a group Y belongs to, as evidence of their likely poor treatment by Y, I simply disagree. It may not be especially strong evidence, but it's also far from trivial.
And all the stuff about martyrdom and Parties of Suffering and who gets to say what for whom seems like a complete distraction.
Wow, thanks! I feel less nervous/unwelcome already!
Let me just apologize on behalf of all of us for whichever of the stains on our honor you're referring to. It wasn't right. (Which one am I saying wasn't right?)
Yay for not acting like EY wants, I guess. No offense or anything, EY, but you've proposed modifications you want to make to people that I don't want made to me already...
(I don't know what I said to deserve an upvote... uh, thanks.)
I'm curious which modifications EY has proposed (specifically) that you don't want made, unless it's just generically the suggestion that people could be improved in any ways whatsoever and your preference is to not have any modifications made to yourself (in a "be true to yourself" manner, perhaps?) that you didn't "choose".
If you could be convinced that a given change to "who you are" would necessarily be an improvement (by your own standards, not externally imposed standards, since you sound very averse to such restrictions) such as "being able to think faster" or "having taste preferences for foods which are most healthy for you" (to use very primitive off-the-cuff examples), and then given the means to effect these changes on yourself, would you choose to do so, or would you be averse simply on the grounds of "then I wouldn't be 'me' anymore" or something similar?
By the middle of the second paragraph I was thinking "Whoa, is everyone an Amanda Baggs fan around here?". Hole in one! I win so many Bayes-points, go me.
I and a bunch of LWers I've talked to about it basically already agree with you on ableism, and a large fraction seems to apply usual liberal instincts to the issue (so, no forced cures for people who can point to "No thanks" on a picture board). There are extremely interesting and pretty fireworks that go off when you look at the social model disability from a transhumanist perspective and I want to round up Alicorn and Anne Corwin and you and a bunch of other people to look at them closely. It doesn't look like curing everyone (you don't want a perfectly optimized life, you want a world with variety, you want change over time), and it doesn't look like current (dis)abilities (what does "blind" mean if most people can see radio waves?), and it doesn't look like current models of disability (if everyone is super different and the world is set up for that and everything is cheap there's no such thing as accommodations), and it doesn't look like the current structures around disability (if society and p...
Welcome!
IQ is valid only for a small part of the population and full-scale IQ is almost worthless
This directly contradicts the mainstream research on IQ: see for instance this or this. If you have cites to the contrary, I'd be curious to read them.
That said, glad to see someone else who's found In My Language - I ran across it many years ago and thought it beautiful and touching.
Yes, you're right. That was a blatant example of availability bias-- the tiny subset of the population for which IQ is not valid makes up a disproportionately large part of my circle. And I consider full-scale IQ worthless for people with large IQ gaps, such as people with learning disabilities, and I don't think it conveys any new information over and above subtest scores in other people. Thank you for reminding me again how very odd I and my friends are.
But I also refer here to understanding, for instance, morality or ways to hack life, and having learned one of the most valuable lessons I ever learned from someone I'm pretty sure is retarded (not Amanda Baggs; it's a young man I know), I know for a fact that some important things aren't always proportional to IQ. In fact, specifically, I want to say I learned to be better by emulating him, and not just from the interaction, lest you assume it's something I figured out that he didn't already know.
I don't have any studies to cite; just personal experience with some very abnormal people. (Including myself, I want to point out. I think I'm one of those people for whom IQ subtests are useful-- in specific, limited ways-- but for whom full-scale IQ means nothing because of the great variance between subtest scores.)
But in a cooperative endeavor like that, who's going to listen to me explaining I don't want to change in the way that would most benefit them?
Those of us who endorse respecting individual choices when we can afford to, because we prefer that our individual choices be respected when we can afford it.
I am not in principle opposed to people having all the strengths and none of the weaknesses of multiple types [..] I don't think that in practice it will work for most people
If you think it will work for some people, but not most, are you in principle opposed to giving whatever-it-is-that-distinguishes-the-people-it-works-for for to anyone who wants it?
More broadly: I mostly consider all of this "what would EY do" stuff a distraction; the question that interests me is what I ought to want done and why I ought to want it done, not who or what does it. If large-scale celibacy is a good idea, I want to understand why it's a good idea. Being told that some authority figure (any authority figure) advocated it doesn't achieve that. Similarly, if it's a bad idea, I want to understand why it's a bad idea.
Have you read his paper on CEV? To the best of my knowledge, that's the clearest place he's laid out what he wants an AGI to do, and I wouldn't really label it "take over the world and do what [Eliezer Yudkowsky] wants" except for broad use of those terms to the point of dropping their typical connotations.
These are valid points, but you said that there still exist several cultures where women are considered to be more sexual than men. Shouldn't they then show up in the international studies? Or are these cultures so rare as to not be included in the studies?
Also, it occurs to me that whether or not the differences are biological is somewhat of a red herring. If they are mainly cultural, then it means that it will be easier for an FAI to modify them, but that doesn't affect the primary question of whether they should be modified. Surely that question is entirely independent of the question of their precise causal origin?
Hello. I found this place as a result of reading Yudkowski's intuitive explanation of Bayes Theorem. I think we are like a very large group of blind people each trying to describe the elephant on the basis of the small part we touch. However, if I can aggregate the tactile observations of a large number of us blind people, I might end up with a pretty good idea of what that elephant looks like. That's my goal - to build a coherent and consistent mental picture of that elephant.
Hello my name is Zachary Aletheia (when my wife and i got married we decided to choose a last name based on something that had meaning to use aletheia means truth in greek and we both have a passion for finding out the truth). Looking back on my journey to being a rationalist i think it was a 2 step process (though given how i've repeatedly thought about it i probably have changed the details in my memory quite a bit). I think the first step was during a anthropology class i watched this film about "magic" (i was a neo-pagan at the time who beli...
I came across a post on efficiency of charity, and joined in order to be able to add my comments. I'm not sure I would identify myself as a rationalist at all, though I share some of what I understand to be rationalist values.
I am a musician and a teacher. I'm also a theist, though I hope to be relatively untroublesome about this and I have no wish to proselytize. Rather, I'm interested in exploring rational ways of discussing or thinking about moral and ethical issues that have more traditionally been addressed within a religious framework.
The expected knowledge at LW...is probably middling to above average for me. More relevantly, much more knowledge of science, and in particular the sciences that contribute to rationality (or, more realistically, the ones touched on in the sequences), which tend to be fairly 'hard'. I've found a much higher knowledge of, e.g. history, classical philosophy, politics/political science, and other 'softer' disciplines is expected elsewhere.
I presume you are averaging over a high-sophistication sample of the internet, not the internet at large.
Hello all. I want to sign up for cryonics, but am not sure how. Is there a guide? What are the differences in the process for minors? [I pressed enter in the comment box but there aren't any breaks in the comment itself; how do you make breaks between lines in comments?] I'm a sixteen-year-old male from Louisiana in the US. I was raised Christian and converted to atheism a few months ago. I found Less Wrong from Eliezer's site--I don't remember how I found that--and have been lurking and reading sequences since.
Hi Less Wrong,
I'm a computer scientist currently living in Seattle. I used to work for Google, but I've since left to work on a game-creation-software startup. I came to Less Wrong to see Eliezer's posts about Friendly AI and stayed because a lot of interesting philosophical discussion happens here. It's refreshing to see people engaging earnestly with important issues, and the community is supportive rather than combative; nice work!
I'm interested in thinking clearly about my values and helping other people think about theirs. I was surprised to see that ...
What is the outcome that you want to socially engineer into existence? What is it that you want the world to realize?
Global Positive Singularity. As opposed to annihilation, or the many other likely scenarios.
You remind me of myself maybe 15 years ago. Excited about the idea of escaping the human condition through advanced technology, but with the idea of avoiding bad (often apocalyptically bad) outcomes also in the mix; wanting the whole world to get excited about this prospect; writing essays and SF short short stories about digital civilizations ...
I don't think the view that there are genetic racial differences in IQ is popular here, if that's what you're referring to. It's come up a few times and the consensus seems to be that the evidence points to cultural and environmental explanations for the racial IQ gap. When you said "human biodiversity", I thought you were referring to psychological differences among humans and the idea that we don't all think the same way.
My impression was that it is popular here, but I may be overgeneralizing from a few examples or other contexts.
The fact th...
1: The universe seems slanted towards Entropy. This suggests a 'start'. Which suggests something to start the universe. This of course has a great many logical fallacies inherent in it, but it's one element.
If this point is logically fallacious, why is it the foundation of your belief? Eliezer has addressed the topic, but that post focuses more on whether one should jump to the idea of God from the idea of a First Cause, which you do seem to have thought about. But why assume a First Cause at all?
On a slightly different tack, if Thor came down (Or is it...
Hi, my name is Dave Whitlock, I have been a rationalist my whole life. I have Asperger's, so rationalism comes very easily to me, too easily ;) I have a blog
http://daedalus2u.blogspot.com/
Which is mostly about nitric oxide physiology, but that includes a lot of stuff. Lately I have been working a lot on neurodevelopment and especially on autism spectrum disorders.
I comment a fair amount in the blogosphere, Science Based Medicine, neurologica, skepchick, Left brain-right brain and sometimes Science blogs; pretty much only under the daedalus2u pseudony...
I think gains from trade is one of the most uplifting (true) concepts in all of the social sciences. It is a tragedy that it is not more widely appreciated. Most people see trade as zero sum.
Hello from the lurking shadows!
Some stats:
I've pretty much always been at least an aspiring rationalist, and I convinced myself of atheism at a pretty early age. My journey to LW started with my discovery of Aubrey de Gray in middle school and my discovery of the transhumanism movemen...
I'm a philosophy PhD student. I studied math and philosophy as an undergrad. I work on ethics and a smattering of Bayesian topics. I care about maximizing the sum of desirable experiences that happen in the future. In less noble moments, I care more immediately about advancing my career as a philosopher and my personal life.
I ran into OB a couple years ago when Robin Hanson came and gave a talk on disagreement at a seminar I was attending. I started reading OB, and then I drifted to LW territory a few months ago.
At first, much of the discussion here s...
Hello.
Call me Thomas. I am 22. The strongest force directing my life can be called an extreme phobia of disorder. I came across overcoming bias and Eliezer Yudkowsky's writings, around the same time, in high school, shortly after reading GEB and The Singularity Is Near.
The experience was not a revelation but a relief. I am completely sane! Being here is solace. The information here is mostly systematized, which has greatly helped to organize my thoughts on rationality and has saved me a great amount of time.
I am good at tricking people into thinking I am s...
I came to Less Wrong via Overcoming Bias. I heard a ta...
I've notice time and time again that, if you ask a teacher a lot of questions, most people will assume you're incompetent.
Interesting -- my experience was that they (the class, but sometimes also the teacher) found me annoying, instead.
During my (brief) venture in college, taking a beginning calculus class, I tended to run way behind the teacher, trying to figure out why he'd done some particular step, and would finally give in and ask about it.
Invariably, he would glance at that step, and go, "Oh, you're right. That's wrong, I should have done......
I read the "Meaning of Life FAQ" by a previous version of Eliezer in 1999 when I was trying to write something similar, from a Pascal’s Wager angle (even a tiny possibility of objective value is what should determine your actions). I've been a financial supporter of the Organization That Can't Be Named and a huge fan of Eliezer's writings since that same time. After reading "Crisis of Faith" along with "Could Anything Be Right?" I finally gave up on objective value; the...
OK, let's get this started. There seems to be no way of doing this that doesn't sound like a personal ad.
As well as programming for a living, I'm a semi-professional cryptographer and cryptanalyst; read more on my work there. Another interest important to me is sexual politics; I am bi, poly and kinky, and have been known to organise events related to these themes (BiCon, Polyday, and a fetish nightclub). I get the im...
Hi! I'm 18 years old, female, and a college student (don't want to release personal information beyond that!). I'm majoring in math, and I hopefully want to use those skills for AI research :D
I found you guys from EA, and I started reading the sequences last week, but I really do have a burning question I want to post to the Discussion board so I made an account.
Hi, I am Olga, female, 40, programmer, mother of two. Got here from HPMoR. Can not as yet define myself as a rationalist, but I am working on it. Some rationality questions, used in real life conversations, have helped me to tackle some personal and even family issues. It felt great. In my "grown-up" role I am deeply concerned to bring up my kids with their thoughts process as undamaged as I possibly can and maybe even to balance some system-taught stupidity. I am at the start of my reading list on the matter, including LW sequences.
Hello. My name is not, in fact, Gloria. My username is merely (what I thought was) a pretty-sounding Latin translation of the phrase "the Glory of the Stars", though it would actually be "Gloria Siderum" and I was mixing up declensions.
I read Three Worlds Collide more than a year ago, and recently re-stumbled upon this site via a link from another forum. Reading some of Elizier's series', I realized that most of my conceptions about the world were were extremely fuzzy, and they could be better said to bleed into each other than to tie ...
I did not mean to imply that I had actual knowledge of QM, just that I had more now than before. If I was interested in understanding QM in more detail, I would take a course on it at my college. It turns out that I am so interested, and that I plan to take such a course in Spring 2013.
I also know that there are people on this site, apparently a greater percentage than with similar issues, who disagree with EY about the Many Worlds Interpretation. I have not been able to follow their arguments, because the ones I have seen generally assume a greater knowle...
Hello,
I am a world citizen with very little sense of identification or labelling. Perhaps "Secular Humanist" could be my main affiliation. As for belonging to nations and companies and teams... I don't believe in this thrust-upon, unchosen unity. I'm a natural expatriate. And I believe this site is awesomeness incarnate.
Though some lesswrongers really seem to go out of their way to make their readers feel stupid... though I'd guess that's the whole point, right?
I don't really trust self-evaluation for questions like this, unfortunately -- it's too likely to be confounded by people's moral self-image, which is exactly the sort of thing I'd expect to be affected by a religious conversion. Bagels would still work, though.
Actually, if I was designing a study like this I think I'd sign a bunch of people up ostensibly for longitudial evaluation on a completely different topic -- and leave a basket of bagels in the waiting room.
My experience with LW's attitude has been similar, though owing to a different reason. Religion generally seems to be treated here as the result of cognitive bias, same as any number of other poorly setup beliefs.
Though LW does tend to use the word "insane" in a way that includes any kind of irrational cognition, I so far have interpreted that to mostly be slang, not meant to literally imply that all irrational cognition is mental illness (although the symptoms of many mental illnesses can be seen as a subset of irrational cognition).
Only Jehovah. He says that he's going to send his worshipers to heaven and Astarte's to hell. Astarte says neither Jehovah nor she will send anyone anywhere. Either one could be a liar, or they could be in a duel and each describing what happens if xe wins.
Has anyone here described religious beliefs as being characteristically caused by mental illness? I'd be concerned if they had, since such a statement would be (a) incorrect and (b) stigmatizing.
In this post, Eliezer characterized John C. Wright's conversion to Catholicism as the result of a temporal lobe epileptic fit and said that at least some (not sure if he meant all) religious experiences were "brain malfunctions."
You not being Will_Newsome. (I can't imagine how bizarre it must be to be watching this conversation from your perspective.)
I didn't exactly realize it, but I reduced the probability. My goal was never to make a bet, my goal was to sockblock Will. But in the end I found his protestations somewhat convincing; he actually sounded for a moment like someone earnestly defending himself, rather than like a joker. And I wasn't in the mood to re-run my comparison between the Gospel of Will and the Knitter's Apocryphon. So I tried to retire the bet in a fair way, since having an ostentatious unsubstantiated accusation of sockpuppetry in the air is almost as corrosive to community trust as it is to be beset by the real thing. (ETA: I posted this before I saw Kevin's comment, by the way!)
Oh, so by "Will" you mean "any account controlled by Will" not "the account called Will_Newsome". I think everyone else interpreted it as the latter.
Nick, it was pretty obvious to me that lessdazed and CuSithBell meant the person Will, not "any account controlled by Will" or "the account called Will_Newsome" -- it doesn't matter if the person would be using an account in order to lie, or an email in order to lie, or Morse code in order to lie, just that they would be lying.
If WillNewsome claimed to be both of them and AspiringKnitter did not, then we would know he was lying.
Um? Supposing I'd created both accounts, I could certainly claim as Will that both accounts were me, and claim as AK that they weren't, and in that case Will would be telling the truth.
Yes, it may be legal to check people's IP addresses, but that doesn't mean it's morally okay to do so without asking
No, but it still is morally ok. In fact it is usually the use of multiple accounts that is frowned upon, morally questionable or an outright breach of ToS - not the identification thereof.
Good for you. ^_^
You had a Bad feeling about two Christian quotes that mentioned Hell or demons/hellfire. You also got a Good feeling about a quote from Nietzsche that didn't mention Hell. I don't know the context of your reactions to the Tarot and Wicca, but obviously people have linked those both to Hell. (See also Horned God, "Devil" trump.) So I wanted to get your reaction to a passage with no mention of Hell from an indeterminate religion, in case that sufficed to make it seem Good.
The author designed a famous Tarot deck, and inspired a big chunk (at minimum) of Wicca.
Unless by "godly" you mean "fanatical extremists who approve of terrorism and/or fail to understand why theocracies only work in theory and not in practice".
Understood. When most Christian say things like, "I wish our elected official were more godly", they usually mean, "I really wish we lived in a Christian theocracy", but I see now that you're not one of these people. In this case, would you vote for an atheist and thus against a Christian, if you thought that the atheist candidate's policies were more benefici...
God has been known to speak to people through dreams, visions and gut feelings.
But schizophrenics have been known to experience those things too. How do you tell the difference - even if you're the one it's happening to?
... I thought a workable definition of "Christian" was "person who believes in the divinity of Jesus Christ and tries to follow his teachings", in which case we have a pretty objective test. Jesus taught us to love our neighbors and be merciful. He repeatedly behaved politely toward women of poor morals, converting them with love and specifically avoiding condemnation. Hence, people who are hateful or condemn others are not following his teachings. If that was a mistake, that's different, just like a rationalist could be overconfident-- but to systematically do it and espouse the idea that you should be hateful clearly goes against what Jesus taught as recorded in the Bible.
I seem to be collecting downvotes, so I'll shut up about this shortly. But to me, anyway, this still sounds like No True Scotsman. I suspect that nearly all Christians will agree with your definition (excepting Mormons and JW's, but I assume you added "divinity" in there to intentionally exclude them). However, I seriously doubt many of them will agree with your adjudication. Fundamentalists sincerely believe that the things they do are loving and following the teachings of Jesus. They think you are the one putting the emphasis on the wrong passages. I personally happen to think you probably are much more correct than they are; but the point is neither one of us gets to do the adjudication.
If one assumed that Sensation A was Bad and Sensation B was Good, then they were consistent with Christianity being true. Sometimes they didn't surprise me. Sometimes they did-- I could get the feeling that something was Bad even if I hadn't thought so (had even been interested in doing it) and then later learn that Christian doctrine considered it Bad as well.
This would be considerably more convincing if Christianity were a unified movement.
Suppose there existed only three religions in the world, all of which had a unified dogma and only one interpretation of it. Each of them had a long list of pretty specific doctrinal points, like one religion considering Tarot cards bad and another thinking that they were fine. If your Good and Bad sensations happened to precisely correspond to the recommendations of one particular religion, even in the cases where you didn't actually know what the recommendations were beforehand, then that would be some evidence for the religion being true.
However, in practice there are a lot of religions, and a lot of different Christian sects and interpretations. You've said that you've chosen certain interpretations instead of others because that's the i...
I don't think the conclusion that the morality described by sensations A/B is a property of the universe at large has been justified. You mention that the sensations predict in advance what Christian doctrine describes as moral or immoral before you know directly what that doctrine says, but that strikes me as being an investigation method that is not useful, for two reasons:
Christian culture is is very heavily permeated throughout most English-speaking cultures. A person who grows up in such a culture will have a high likelihood of correctly guessing Christianity's opinion on any given moral question, even if they haven't personally read the relevant text.
More generally, introspection is a very problematic way of gathering data. Many many biases, both obvious and subtle, come into play, and make your job way more difficult. For example: Did you take notes on each instance of feeling A or B when it occurred, and use those notes (and only those notes) later when validating them against Christian doctrine? If not, you are much more likely to remember hits than misses, or even to after-the-fact readjust misses into hits; human memory is notorious for such things.
A universe without God has no innate morality. The only thing that could make morality would be human preference, which changes an awful lot.
In a world entirely without morality, we are constantly facing situations where trusting another person would be mutually beneficial, but trusting when the other person betrays is much worse than mutual betrayal. Decision theory has a name for this type of problem: Prisoner's Dilemma. The rational strategy is to defect, which makes a pretty terrible world.
But when playing an indefinite number of games, it turns out that cooperating, then punishing defection is a strong strategy in an environment of many distinct strategies. That looks a lot like "turn the other cheek" combined with a little bit of "eye for an eye." Doesn't the real world behavior consistent with that strategy vaguely resemble morality?
In short, decision theory suggests that material considerations can justify a substantial amount of "moral" behavior.
Regarding your sensations A and B, from the outside perspective it seems like you've been awfully lucky that your sense of right and wrong match your religious commitments. If you believed We...
sensation A and sensation B
You were not entirely clear, but you seem to be taking these as signals of things being Bad or Good in the morality sense, right? Ok so it feels like there is an objective morality. Let's come up with hypotheses:
You have a morality that is the thousand shards of desire left over by an alien god. Things that were a good idea (for game theory, etc reasons) to avoid in the ancestral environment tend to feel good so that you would do them. Things that feel bad are things you would have wanted to avoid. As we know, an objective morality is what a personal morality feels like from the inside. That is, you are feeling the totally natural feelings of morality that we all feel. Why you attached special affect to the bible, I suppose that's the affect hueristic: you feel like the bible is true and it is the center of your belief or something, and that goodness gets confused with a moral goodness. This is all hindsight, but it seems pretty sound.
Or it could be Jesus-is-Son-of-a-Benevolent-Love-Agent-That-Created-the-Universe. I guess God is sending you signals to say what sort of things he likes/doesn't like? Is that the proposed mechanism for morality? I don't k...
The complex loving god hypothesis is incredibly complicated. Minds are so complex we can't even build one yet.
There are two problems with this argument. First, each individual god might be very improbable, but that could be counterbalanced by the astronomical number of possible gods (e.g. consider all possible tweaks to the holy book), so you can argue apriori against specific flavors of theism but not against theism in general. Second, if Eliezer is right and AI can develop from a simple seed someone can code up in their garage, that means powerful minds don't need high K-complexity. A powerful mind (or a program that blossoms into one) could even be simpler than physics as we currently know it, which is already quite complex and seems to have even more complexity waiting in store.
IMO a correct argument against theism should focus on the "loving" part rather than the "mind" part, and focus on evidence rather than complexity priors. The observed moral neutrality of physics is more probable if there's no moral deity. Given what we know about evolution etc., it's hard to name any true fact that makes a moral deity more likely.
I'm not sure that everything in my comment is correct. But I guess LW could benefit from developing an updated argument against (or for) theism?
Well you are obviously not able to predict the output of your own brain, that's the whole point of the brain. If morality is in the brain and still too complex to understand, you would expect to encounter moral feelings that you had not anticipated.
Let's try that! I got a Bad signal on the Koran and a website explaining the precepts of Wicca, but I knew what both of those were. I would be up for trying a test where you give me quotes from the Christian Bible (warning: I might recognize them; if so, I'll tell you, but for what it's worth I've only read part of Ezekiel, but might recognize the story anyway... I've read a lot of the Bible, actually), other holy books and neutral sources like novels (though I might have read those, too; I'll tell you if I recognize them), without telling me where they're from. If it's too difficult to find Biblical quotes, other Christian writings might serve, as could similar writings from other religions. I should declare up front that I know next to nothing about Hinduism but once got a weak Good reading from what someone said about it. Also, I would prefer longer quotes; the feelings build up from unnoticeable, rather than hitting full-force instantly. If they could be at least as long as a chapter of the Bible, that would be good.
That is, if you're actually proposing that we test this. If you didn't really want to, sorry. It just seems cool.
Against a Biblical literalist, this would probably be a pretty good attack -- if you think a plausible implication of a single verse in the Bible, taken out of context, is an absolute moral justification for a proposed action, then, yes, you can justify pretty much any behavior.
However, this does not seem to be the thrust of AspiringKnitter's point, nor, even if it were, should we be content to argue against such a rhetorically weak position.
Rather, I think AspiringKnitter is arguing that certain emotions, attitudes, dispositions, etc. are repeated often enough and forcefully enough in the Bible so as to carve out an identifiable cluster in thing-space. A kind, gentle, equalitarian pacifist is (among other things) acting more consistently with the teachings of the literary character of Jesus than a judgmental, aggressive, elitist warrior. Assessing whether someone is acting consistently with the literary character of Jesus's teachings is an inherently subjective enterprise, but that doesn't mean that all opinions on the subject are equally valid -- there is some content there.
I'd care if my wife was kidnapped and some simulacrum was given back in her stead but I doubt I would be able to tell if it was such an accurate copy and though if I knew the fake-wife was fake I'd probably be creeped out but if I didn't know I'd just be so glad to have my "wife" back.
My primary concern in a situation like this is that she'd be kidnapped and presumably extremely not happy about that.
If my partner were vaporized in her sleep and then replaced with a perfect simulacrum, well, that's just teleporting (with less savings on airfare...
Isn't a computer a machine, generally made of circuits, that runs programs somebody put on it in a constructed non-context-dependent language?
I personally believe that humans are likewise machines, generally made of meat, that run "programs". I put the word "programs" in scare-quotes because our programs are very different in structure from computer programs, though the basic concept is the same.
What we have in common with computers, though, is that our programs are self-modifying. We can learn, and thus change our own code. Thus, I...
Well, I don't suppose anyone feels the need to draw a bright-line distinction between FAI and uFAI - the AI is more friendly the more its utility function coincides with your own. But in practice it doesn't seem like any AI is going to fall into the gap between "definitely unfriendly" and "completely friendly" - to create such a thing would be a more fiddly and difficult engineering problem than just creating FAI. If the AI doesn't care about humans in the way that we want them to, it almost certainly takes us apart and uses the resourc...
At least, others here seem to be non-monogamous.
Well, some are. From the last survey:
625 people (57.3%) described themselves as monogamous, 145 (13.3%) as polyamorous, and 298 (27.3%) didn't really know. These numbers were similar between men and women.
Yes. That applies to the Jews but not to everyone else. You're allowed to ignore Leviticus and Exodus if you're not Jewish. EY probably knows this, since it's actually Jewish theology (note that others have looked at the same facts and come to the conclusion that the rules don't apply to anyone anymore and stopped applying when Jesus died, so take into account that someone (I don't think it's me) has done something wrong here, as per Aumann's agreement theorem).
Yes, the consensus seems to be that running two copies of yourself in parallel doesn't give you more measure or moral weight. But if the copies receive diferent inputs, they'll eventually (frantic handwaving) diverge into two different people who both matter. (Maybe when we can't retrieve Copy-A's current state from Copy-B's current state and the respective inputs, because information about the initial state has been destroyed?)
Hrm. Now someone's downvoted your question, it seems. It's all a great, sinister conspiracy.
Well, regardless... peuddO is a username I occasionally utilize on internet forums. It's "upside down" in Norwegian, written upside down in Norwegian (I'm so very clever). Even so, I know that I personally prefer to know the names people go by out-of-internet. It's a strange quirk, perhaps, but it makes me feel obligated to provide my real first name when introducing myself.
I like to call myself Sindre online. I'm just barely 18, and I go to school in Norway - which doesn't have a school system entirely similar to any other that I'm familiar with, so I'll refrain from trying to describe what sort of education I'm getting - other than to say that I'm not very impressed with how the public school system is laid out here in Norway.
I found Less Wrong through a comment on this blog, where it was mentioned as a place populated by reasonably intelligent people. Since I thought that was an intriguing endorsement, I decided to give i...
Hello!
I take Paul Graham's advice to keep my identity small, and so describing myself is... odd. I'm not sure I consider rationalism important enough to make it into my identity.
The most important things, I think, are that I'm an individualist and an empiricist. I considered "pragmatist" for the second example, and perhaps that would be more appropriate.
Perhaps vying for third place is that I'm an optimizer. I like thinking about things, I like understanding systems, I like replacing parts with better parts. I think that's what I enjoy about LW; there's quite a bit of interest in optimization around here. Now, how to make that function better... :P
Hello everyone!
I've been quietly lurking on this website for a while now, reading articles as fast as I can with much enthusiasm. I've read most of Eliezer's genius posts and started to read through others' posts now. I've came to this website when I learned about AI-in-a-box scenario. I am a 23 year old male. I have a B.S. in computer science. I like to design and program video games. My goal in life is to become financially independent and make games that help people improve themselves. I find the subject of rationality to be very interesting and helpful...
Studies also show that prayer does have a powerful healing effect - but only if the subject knows that they are being prayed for.
Citations please. The only well controlled study00649-6/abstract) I know of found the opposite - subjects who knew they were being prayed for suffered more complications than those who did not.
Hi. My name's Derrick.
I've been reading LW and HN for a while now but have only just started to learn to participate. I'm 23, ostensibly hold a bachelor's in economics, and interested in way too much - a dilettante of sorts. Unfortunately I have the talent of being able to sound like I know stuff just by quickly reading around a subject.
Pretty much have always been a Traditional Rationalist; kind of treated the site discussions as random (if extremely high impact) insights. Getting interested in Bayesian modeling sort of sent me on a path here. Lots of Eli...
Considering the extraordinary rarity of good explainers in this entire civilization, I'm saddened to say that talent may have something to do with it, not just practice.
This is the Welcome Thread, for people to introduce themselves. People should have more leeway to talk about personal interests that would elsewhere be considered off topic.
Hi,
I am FeministX of FeministX.blogspot.com. I found this blog after Eliezer commented on my site. While my online name is FeministX, I am not a traditional feminist, and many of my intellectual interests lie outside of feminism.
Lately I am interestedin learning more about the genetic and biological basis for individual and group behavior. I am also interested in cryonics and transhumanism. I guess this makes me H+BD.
I am a rationalist by temperament and ideology. Why am I a rationalist? To ask is to answer the question. A person who wishes to accuratel...
Hi,
I'm Alex and I'm studying computer vision at Oxford. Essentially we're trying to build AI that understands the visual world. We use lots of machine learning, probabilistic inference, and even a bit of signal processing. I arrived here through the Future of Humanity Institute website, which I found after listening to Nick Bostrom's TED talk. I've been lurking for a few weeks now but I thought I should finally introduce myself.
I find the rationalist discussion on LW interesting both on a personal interest level, and in relation to my work. I would like to...
My fear of the bullet would cause me to want to avoid it, which would mean I must ensure that I do not flinch. The decision to flinch or not to flinch is in the hands of low-level circuitry in my brain, and the current inputs to that circuitry will tend to produce a flinch. So I would be well advised to change those inputs if I can, by visualizing myself on a beach, curled up in bed, sitting at my computer writing comments on Less Wrong, or some other calming, comforting environment. If this is a form of self-deception, it is one I am comfortable with. It is of the same kind that I practiced as a member of the bardic conspiracy, and I don't think that hurt my epistemic rationality any.
I found OB/LW through Eliezer's Bayes tutorial, and was immediately taken in. It's the perfect mix of several themes that are always running through my head (rationality, atheism, Bayes, etc.) and a great primer on lots of other interesting stuff (QM, AI, ev. psych., etc). The emphasis on improving decision making and clear thinking plus the steady influx of interesting new areas to investigate makes for an...
Having never been interested in AI before, I became obsessed with it about 2 years ago, after getting impressed with its potential. Got a mild case of AI-induced raving insanity, have been recuperating for a last year or so, treating it with regular dosage of rationality and solid math. The obsession doesn't seem to pass though, which I deem a good thing.
Strictly speaking, no proposition is proven false (i.e. probability zero). A proposition simply becomes much less likely than competing, inconsistent explanations. To speak that strictly, falsifiability requires the ability to say in advance what observations would be inconsistent (or less consistent) with the theory.
Your belief that the coin is bent does pay rent - you would be more surprised by 100 straight tails than if you thought the coin was fair. But both P=.6 and P=.5 are not particularly consistent with the new observations.
Map & Territory is ...
Hi everybody,
I've been lurking here for maybe a year and joined recently. I work as an astrophysicist and I am interested in statistics, decision theory, machine learning, cognitive and neuro-psychology, AI research and many others (I just wish I had more time for all these interests). I find LW to be a great resource and it introduced me to many interesting concepts. I am also interested in articles on improving productivity and well-being.
I haven't yet attended any meet-up, but if there was one in Munich I'd try to come.
Judging by the recent survey, your cryonics beliefs are pretty normal with 53% considering it, 36% rejecting it and only 4% having signed up. LW isn't a very hive-mindey community, unless you count atheism.
(The singularity, yes, you're very much in the minority with the most skeptical quartile expecting it in 2150)
Delicious controversy. Yum. I might have a lulz-relapse and become a troll.
So... voicing disagreement boldly is trolling, voicing it nervously is trolling and trying to prevent being called out. Signalling distance from the group is trolling and accusations of hive mind, signalling group membership is trolling and going "Seriously, I'm one of you guys". Joking about the image a group idea's have, in the same way the group itself does, is straw-manning and caricature, seriously worrying about those ideas is damsel-in-distress crap.
Burn the wit...
Nah, false beliefs are worthless. That which is true is already so; owning up to it doesn't make it worse. If I turned out to actually be wrong-- well, I have experience being wrong about religion. I'd probably react just like I did before.
I don't know, but this kind of serious discussion requires skills I just don't have.
But remember, fixing this sort of problem is ostensibly what we're here for.
If we fail at that for reasons you can articulate, I at least would like to know.
Um do you know any easy way to provide a lot of evidence that I have only one sockpuppet?
Ask a moderator (or whatever it takes to have access to IP logs) to check to see if there are multiple suspicious accounts from your most common IP. That's even better than asking you to raise your right hand if you are not lying. It at least shows that you have enough respect for the community to at least try to hide it when you are defecting! :P
I think you severely underestimate the value of trolling.
And I suspect you incorrectly classify some of your contributions, placing them into a different subcategory within "willful defiance of the community preference" than where they belong. Unfortunately this means that the subset of your thoughts that are creative, deep and informed rather than just incoherent and flawed tend to be wasted.
I ... was shocked at how downright anti-informative the field is
Explain?
shocked at how incredibly useless statistics is
Explain?
The opposite happened with the parapsychology literature
Elaborate?
Local coherence is the hobgoblin of miniscule minds; global coherence is next to godliness.
Well, you're half right.
Not telling which half.
Best wishes. Was your previous explanation earlier in your interchange with Bugmaster? If so, I agree that Bugmaster would have read your explanation, and that pointing to it wouldn't help (I sympathize). If, however, your previous explanation was in response to another lesswrongian, it is possible that Bugmaster missed it, in which case a pointer might help. I've been following your comments, but I'm sure I've missed some of them.
I really want to throw up my hands here and say "but I've explained this MULTIPLE TIMES, you are BEING AN IDIOT" but I remember the illusion of transparency.
One option would be to reply with a pointer to your previous comment. I see you've used the link syntax within a comment - this web site supports permalinks to comments as well. At least you wouldn't be forced to repeat yourself.
Is either of those well-known? What about the pattern with which they're felt? Sound like anything you know? Me neither.
In addition to dlthomas's suggestion of the affect heuristic, I'd suggest something like the ideomotor effect amplified by confirmation bias.
However, there's a reason I put "cognitive bias" as the first item on my list: I believe that it is overwhelmingly more likely than any alternatives. Thus, it would take a significant amount of evidence to convince me that I'm not laboring under such a bias, even if the bias does not yet...
Why did you frame it that way, rather than that AspiringKnitter wasn't a Christian, or was someone with a long history of trolling, or somesuch? It's much less likely to get a particular identity right than to establish that a poster is lying about who they are.
Wow. Now that you mention it, perhaps someone should ask AspiringKnitter what she thinks of dubstep...
(Er, well, math intuitions in a few specific fields, and only one or two rather specific dubstep videos. I'm not, ya know, actually crazy. The important thing is that that video is, as the kids would offensively say, "sicker than Hitler's kill/death ratio".) newayz I upvoted your original comment.
That's remarkably confident. This doesn't really read like Newsome to me (and how would one find out with sufficient certainty to decide a bet for that much?).
And the winners are... dlthomas, who gets $15, and ITakeBets, who gets $100, for being bold enough to bet unconditionally. I accept their bets, I formally concede them, aaaand we're done.
You write stream-of-consciousness run-on sentences which exhibit abnormal disclosure of self while still actually making sense (if one can be bothered parsing them). Not only do you share this trait with Will, the themes and the phrasing are the same. You have a deep familiarity with LessWrong concerns and modes of thought, yet you also advocate Christian metaphysics and monogamy. Again, that's Will.
That's not yet "extremely obvious", but it should certainly raise suspicions. I expect that a very strong case could be made by detailed textual comparison.
AspiringKnitter's arguments for Christianity are quite different from Will's, though.
(Also, at the risk of sounding harsh towards Will, she's been considerably more coherent.)
I think if Will knew how to write this non-abstractly, he would have a valuable skill he does not presently possess, and he would use that skill more often.
Point of curiosity: if you took the point above and rewrote it the way you think AspiringKnitter would say it, how would you say it?
(ETA: Something like this:)
What I'm saying is that most people who write a Less Wrong comment aren't totally stressing out about all the tradeoffs that inevitably have to be made in order to say anything at all. There's a famous quote whose gist is 'I apologize that this letter is so long, but I didn't have very much time to write it'. The audience has some large and unknown set of constraints on what they're willing to glance at, read, take seriously, and so on, and the writer has to put a lot of work into meeting those constraints as effectively as possible. Some tradeoffs are easy to make: yes, a long paragraph is a self-contained stucture, but that's less important than readibility. Others are a little harder: do I give a drawn-out concrete example of my point, or would that egregiously inflate the length of my comment?
There are also the author's internal constraints re what they feel they need to say, what they're willing to say, what they're willing to say without thinking carefully about whether or not it's a good idea to say, how much effort they can put into rewriting sentences or linking to relevant papers while their heart's pumping as if the house is burning down, vague...
Wow, is that all of your information? You either have a lot of money to blow, or you're holding back.
For what it's worth, I thought Mitchell's hypothesis seemed crazy at first, then looked through user:AspiringKnitter's comment history and read a number of things that made me update substantially toward it. (Though I found nothing that made it "extremely obvious", and it's hard to weigh this sort of evidence against low priors.)
What possible proof could I offer you? I can't take you up on the bet because, while I'm not Newsome, I can't think of anything I could do that he couldn't fake if this were a sockpuppet account. If we met in person, I could be the very same person as Newsome anyway; he could really secretly be a she. Or the person you meet could be paid by Newsome to pretend to be AspiringKnitter.
Allow me to invent (or put under the microscope a slight, existing) distinction.
"Poorly stated" - not explicit, without fixed meaning. The words written may mean any of several things.
"Poorly worded" - worded so as to mean one thing which is wrong, perhaps even obviously wrong, in which case the writer may intend for people to assume he didn't mean the obviously wrong thing, but instead meant the less literal, plausibly correct thing.
I have several times criticized the use of the words "immortal" and "immortality" by...
That said, here's a random compilation of Chrtistianity-to-Islam conversion testimonials. You can also check out the daily "Why am I an Atheist" feature on Pharyngula, but be advised that this site is quite a bit more angry than Less Wrong, so the posts may not be representative.
Thank you.
Well, I brought that up because I know of at least one mental illness-related violent incident in my own extended family.
I'm sorry.
...I think they key disagreement we're having is along the following lines: is it better to believe in something that's true,
But that's also true with eye for an eye - one defection merits one defection; it's not "two eyes for an eye".
I think it indicates that Christians have done stupid things and one must be discerning about traditions rather than blindly accepting everything taught in church as 100% true, and certainly not everything commonly believed by laypersons!
It's not surprising (unless this is hindsight bias-- it might actually BE surprising, considering how unwilling Christians should have been to make compromises like that, but a lot of time passed between Jesus's death and Christianity taking over Europe, didn't it?) that humans would be humans. I can see where I might have...
I find "if it walks like a duck and talks like a duck" to be a really good way of identifying ducks.
Well, that's an easy question: if you've worked sixteen hour days for the last forty years and you're just six months away from curing cancer completely and you know you're going to get the Nobel and be fabulously wealthy etc. etc. and an alien shows up and offers you a cure for cancer on a plate, you take it, because a lot of people will die in six months. This isn't even different to how the world currently is - if I invented a cure for cancer it would be detrimental to all those others who were trying to (and who only cared about getting there first) - ...
I endorse dthomas' answer in the grandparent; we were talking about uploads.
I have no idea what to do with word "provably" here. It's not clear to me that I'm provably me right now, or that I'll be provably me when I wake up tomorrow morning. I don't know how I would go about proving that I was me, as opposed to being someone else who used my body and acted just like me. I'm not sure the question even makes any sense.
To say that other people's judgments on the matter define the issue is clearly insufficient. If you put X in a dark cave with no o...
I'm afraid you may be a bit confused on this. What are the odds that out of all ethnicities on the planet, only Ashkenazi Jews where the ones to develop a different IQ than the surrounding peoples? And only in the past thousand years or so. What about all those groups that have been isolated or differentiated in very different natural and even social environments for tens of thousands of years?
Unless you are using "the racial gap" to refer to the specific measured IQ differences between people of African, European and East Asian descent, which m...
It's even more complicated than that. If I see a few strangers in immediate, unambiguous danger, I'm pretty sure I will die to save them. But I will not spend all that much on donating to a charity that will save these same people, twenty years later and two thousand miles away. (...what was that about altruistic ideals being Far?)
No. I apologize for being unclear. EY has proposed modifications I don't want, but that doesn't mean every modification he supports is one I don't want. I think I would be more skeptical than most people here, but I wouldn't refuse all possible enhancements as a matter of principle.
Hey, everyone!
I'm currently an (actual) college student and (aspiring) omniscient. I'm also a transhumanist, which is possibly how I got here in the first place.
I've been lurking on and off since the days of Overcoming Bias, and I've finally decided to (try to) actually become involved with the community. As you can probably guess from my period of inactivity I have a tendency to read much more than I write, so this may prove more difficult than it sounds.
I've been very interested in "how things work," both outside and inside my head, for as long...
"You don't become great by trying to be great. You become great by wanting to do something, and then doing it so hard that you become great in the process."
-- Randall Munroe
In the spirit of your (excellent) new post, I'll attack all the weak points of your argument at once:
the presence of something, let's call it a soul, that makes people worthwhile
This definition doesn't give souls any of their normal properties, like being the seat of subjective experience, or allowing free will, or surviving bodily death. That's fine, but we need to be on the look-out in case these meanings sneak in as connotations later on. (In particular, the "Zombies" sequence doesn't talk about moral wort...
Oh,sorry, I see...
Well, overcoming this worldview consisted mainly of reading some sequences of Eliezer:-)
And remember that I wasn't a New-Age crackpot. I had only very mild mystic experiences, but these alone lead me to question the nature of consiousness, the universe etc..
So for me it was not really difficult, but I imagine that really radical experiences make you "immune" to a naturalistic, atheistic explanation.
I think Yvain made a similar experience with hashish (This post also convinced me that mystic experiences are only strange realig...
Does anyone know a good resource to go with Eliezer's comic guide on Lob's Theorem? It's confusing me a... well, a lot.
Or, if it's the simplest resource on it out there, are there any prerequisites for learning it/ skills/ knowledge that would help?
I'm trying to build up a basis of skills so I can participate better here, but I've got a long way to go. Most of my skills in science, maths and logic are pretty basic.
Thanks in advance.
I'm a 22-year-old undergraduate senior, majoring in physics, planning to graduate in May and go to graduate school for experimental high energy physics. I also have studied applied math, computer science, psychology, and politics. I like science fiction and fantasy novels, good i.e. well-written TV, comic books, and the occasional video game. I've been an atheist and science enthusiast since the age of 10, and I've pursued rational philosophy since high school.
I got here via HPMoR, lurked since around the time Chapter 10 was posted, and found that a lot of...
Hello, I've been lurking LessWrong for some time, and I have finally decided to make an account to add my comments. I also expect to post an article every now and then.
I am Spanish, which seems rare because it's hard to find non-English people here. I'm studying Computer Science and maybe in the future I'll get a master's degree in AI. I'm interested in computers, the brain, AI, rationality, futurism, transhumanism, etc. Oh, and I love Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality.
I am college student who found this website through a friend and Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality.
Yeah, I know what it looks like: meta-physical rubbish.
It is. I got as far as this paragraph of the introduction to his paper before I found a critical flaw:
Of particular interest to natural scientists is the fact that the laws of nature are a language. To some extent, nature is regular; the basic patterns or general aspects of structure in terms of which it is apprehended, whether or not they have been categorically identified, are its “laws”. The existence of these laws is given by the stability of perception.
At this point, he's already begging...
I'm currently an electrical engineering student. I suppose the main thing that drew me here is that I hold uncommon political views (market libertarian/minarchist, generally sympathetic to non-coercive but non-market collective action); I think that view is "correct" for now, but I'm sure that a lot of my reasons for holding those beliefs are faulty, or there'd probably be at least a few more people who agree with me. I want to determine exactly what's happening (and why) when politics and political philosophy come up in a conversation/internal m...
Hi! 21 year old university dropout located in Melbourne, Australia. Coming from a background of mostly philosophy, linguistics, and science fiction but now recognising that my dislike for maths and hard science comes from a social dynamic at my high school: humanities students were a separate clique from the maths/sci students and both looked down on each other, and I bought into it to gain status with my group. So that's one major thing that LW has done for me in the few months I've been reading it: helped me recognise and eventually remove a rationalisat...
Greetings All.
I've been a Singularitan since my college years more than a decade ago. I still clearly remember the force with which that worldview and its attendant realizations colonized my mind.
At that time I was strongly enamored with a vision of computer graphics advancing to the point of pervasive, Matrix-like virtual reality and that medium becoming the creche from which superhuman artificial intelligence would arise. (the Matrix of Gibson's Neuromancer, as this was before the film of the same name). Actually, I still have that vision, and altho...
Hello I am a professional composer/composition teacher and adjunct instructor teaching music aesthetics to motion graphic artists at the Fashion Institute of Technology and in the graduate computer arts department at the School of Visual Arts. I have a masters from the Juilliard School in composition and have been recorded on Newport Classics with Kurt Vonnegut and Michael Brecker.
I live and work in New York City. I spend my life composing and explaining music to students who are not musicians, connecting the language of music to the principles of the visual medium. Saying the accurate thing getting others to question me letting them find their way and admitting often that I am wrong is a life long journey.
It seems clear to me that much of the time when people mistakenly get offended, they're mistaken about what sort of claim they should get offended about, not just mistaken about what claim was made.
I don't think the view that there are genetic racial differences in IQ is popular here, if that's what you're referring to. It's come up a few times and the consensus seems to be that the evidence points to cultural and environmental explanations for the racial IQ gap. When you said "human biodiversity", I thought you were referring to psychological differences among humans and the idea that we don't all think the same way.
The psychological diversity article you link to is about Gregory Cochran's and Henry Harpending's book, which is all about...
Participant here from the beginning and from OB before that, posting under a throwaway account. And this will probably be my only comment on the race-IQ issue here.
I don't think the view that there are genetic racial differences in IQ is popular here, if that's what you're referring to. It's come up a few times and the consensus seems to be that the evidence points to cultural and environmental explanations for the racial IQ gap [emphasis mine].
The vast majority of writers here have not given their opinion on the topic. Many people here write under t...
I want to know what's true. Even if Christianity wasn't true, I've already found a great deal of Truth in its teachings for how to live life. The Bible, I feel, encourages a rational mindset, as much as many might think otherwise - to not use one's intellect to examine one's religion would be to reject many of Jesus' teachings.
Having been religious (in particular, a very traditionalist Catholic, more so than my parents by far)† for a good chunk of my life before averting to atheism a few years ago (as an adult), I would have agreed with you, but a bit u...
Apologies, I'm not as interesting as that. I changed a lot of beliefs about the belief system, but I was nonetheless still raised Christian.
See also: Epistemic luck.
I believe the bible was divinely inspired
Why? This seems to be the foundation for all your justifications here, and it's an incredibly strong claim. What evidence supports it? Is there any (weaker, presumably) evidence that contradicts it? I'd suggest you take a look at the article on Privileging the Hypothesis, which is a pretty easy failure mode to fall into when the hypothesis in question was developed by someone else.
This was an attempt at humor. Usually when people start sentences with "Whatever religion we adhere to..." they are going to utter a platitude ending with "...we all believe in love/life/goodness". The intended joke was to come about through a subversion of the audience's expectation. It was also meant to poke fun at all the torture discussions here lately, though perhaps that's already been done to death.
If you are determined to read the sequences, you'll see. At least read the posts linked from the wiki pages.
I'm not sure of the technical definition of AGI, but essentially I mean a machine that can reason. I don't plan to give it outputs until I know what it does.
Well, you'll have the same chance of successfully discovering that AI does what you want as a sequence of coin tosses spontaneously spelling out the text of "War and Peace". Even if you have a perfect test, you still need for the tested object to have a chance of satisfying the test...
I'm not sure of the technical definition of AGI, but essentially I mean a machine that can reason. I don't plan to give it outputs until I know what it does.
I am not sure what you mean by "give it outputs", but you may be interested in this investigation of attempting to contain an AGI.
...I don't mean that life is the terminal value that all human's actions reduce to. I mean it in exactly the way I said above; for me to achieve any other value requires that I am alive. I also don't mean that every value I have reduces to my desire to live, just
Hello. I'm 35, Russian, work as very applied programmer. I end up here by side effect of following path RNN -> RBM -> DBN -> G. E. Hinton -> S. Legg's blog.
I was almost confident about my biases, when "Generalizing From One Example" take me by surprise (some time ago I noticed that I cannot visualize abstract colored cube without thinking color's name, so I generalized. Now I generalized this case of generalization, and had a strange feeling). I'd attention switch and desided to explore.
Hi, I'm Daniel. I've read OB for a long time and followed on LW right in the beginning, but work /time issues in the last year made my RSS reading queue really long (I had all LW posts in the queue). I'm a Brazilian programmer, long time rationalist and atheist.
I looked around for an FAQ link and didn't see one, and I've gone through all my preferences and haven't found anything relevant. Is there any way to arrange for followup comments (I suppose, the contents of my account inbox) to be emailed to me?
Hi! Vectored here by Robin who's thankfully trolling for new chumps and recommending initial items to read. I note the Wiki would be an awesome place for some help, and may attempt to put up a page there: NoobDiscoveringLessWrongLeavesBreadcrumbs, or something like that.
My immediate interest is argument: how can we disagree? 1+1=2. Can't that be extrapolated to many things. I have been so happy to see a non-cocky (if prideful) attitude in the first several posts that I have great hopes for what I may learn here. We have to remember ignorance is an imp...
But my dilemma is that Chris Langan is the smartest known living man, which makes it really hard for me to shrug the CTMU off as nonsense.
You can't rely too much on intelligence tests, especially in the super-high range. The tester himself admitted that Langan fell outside the design range of the test, so the listed score was an extrapolation. Further, IQ measurements, especially at the extremes and especially on only a single test (and as far as I could tell from the wikipedia article, he was only tested once) measure test-taking ability as much as g...
N.B. - LSD doesn't do something well characterized by "fry your brain" (most of the time). And if you meant acid in the chemical sense, that was very bad advice.
Hello! I'm Oliver, as my username should make evident. I'm 17 years old, and this site was recommended to me by a friend, whose LW username I observe is 'Larks'. I drift over to Overcoming Bias occasionally, and have RSS feeds to Richard Dawkins' site and (the regrettably sensationalist) NewScientist magazine. As far as I can see past my biases, I aspire to advance my understanding of the kinds of things I've seen discussed here, science, mathematics, rationality and a large chunk of stuff that at the moment rather confuses me.
I started education with a pr...
Handle: Larks (also commonly Larklight, OxfordLark, Artrix)
Name: Ben
Sex: Male
Location: Eastbourne, UK
Age: at 17 I suspect I may be the baby of the group?
Education: results permitting (to which I assign a probability in excess of 0.99) I'll be reading Mathematics and Philosophy at Oxford
Occupation: As yet, none. Currently applying for night-shift work at a local supermarket
I came to LW through OB, which I found as a result of Bryan Caplan's writing on Econlog (or should it be at Econlog?). I fit much of the standard pattern: atheist, materialist, ec...
Greetings. To this community, I will only be known as "Whisper". I'm a believer in science and rationality, but also a polythiest and a firm believer that there are some things that science cannot explain. I was given the site's address by one Alicorn, who I've been trying to practice Far-Seeing with...with much failure.
I'm 21 years old right now, living in NY, and am trying to write my novels. As for who I am, well, I believe you'll all just have to judge me for yourself by my actions (posts) rather than any self-description. Thankee to any of you who bothered to read.
(This is in response to a comment of brynema’s elsewhere; if we want LW discussions to thrive even in cases where the discussions require non-trivial prerequisites, my guess is that we should get in the habit of taking “already discussed exhaustively” questions to the welcome thread. Or if not here, to some beginner-friendly area for discussing or debating background material.)
brynema wrote:
...So the idea is that a unique, complex thing may not necessarily have an appreciation for another unique complexity? Unless appreciating unique complexity has a mat
Occupation: statistical programmer (would be a postdoc if I were actually post the doc) at the Ottawa Institute of Systems Biology
I'm principally interested in Bayesian probability theory (as applied in academic contexts as opposed to rationalist ones). I don't currently attempt to apply rationalist principles in my own life, but I find the discussion interesting.
I discovered Less Wrong from a post on Overcoming Bias. I discovered Overcoming Bias from a comment on Slashdot.
I have been promoting rationality for as long as I can remember, although I have improved much in the past few years and even more after discovering this forum. About the same time as "citation needed" exploded on Wikipedia, I started applying this standard...
Not "A" win, but winning in general, Winning at Life if you will.
To me, this means :
Staying true to myself, becoming only what I decide I want to be (which is in turn based on achieving sub-goals)
Achieving my lesser and short-term goals.
Being able to constantly improve myself
Not Dying (I'm only not signed up for cryo because I live in Japan and have trouble with the creation of a suitable policy. Ideally, I'd like to go transhuman.)
Explicit failure scenarios involve becoming a future self that stays still instead of moving forward. If...
I found OB through StumbleUpon.
I was a serious fundamentalist evangelical until about age 2...
Working in AI, cognitive science and decision theory are of professional interest to me. This community is interesting to me mostly out of bafflement. It's not clear to me exactly what the Point of it is.
I can understand the desire for a place to talk about such things, and a gathering point for folks with similar opinions about them, but ...
I'm here by way of Overcoming Bias which attracted me with its mix of topics I'm interested in (psychology, economics, AI, atheism, rationality). With a lapsed catholic mother and agnostic father I had a half-heartedly religious upbringing but have been an atheist for as long as I can remember thin...
Hi, I've been lurking for a few weeks and am likely to stay in lurker mode indefinitely. But I thought I should comment on the welcome thread.
I would prefer to stay anonymous at the moment, but I'm male, 20's, BS in computer programming & work as a software engineer.
As an outsider, some feedback for you all:
Interesting topics -- keep me reading Jargon -- a little is fine, but the more there is, the harder it is to follow. The fact that people make go (my favorite game) references is a nice plus.
I would classify myself as a theist at the moment. As such...
I read Less Wrong for the insight of the authors, which on other blogs would be buried in drivel. Unlike most blogs, Less Wrong has both norms against sloppy thinking and a population of users who know enough to enforce it. Many other blogs have posts that are three-fourths repetition of news stories that I've already seen, and comments that are three-fourths canned responses and confabulation.
Perhaps take out the "describe what it is that you protect" part. That's jargon / non-obvious new concept.
As long as I can remember, I've been an atheist with a strong rationalist bent, inspired by my grandfather, a molecular biologist who wanted at least one grandchild to be a scientist. I discoverd Overcoming Bias a year or so ago and became completely enthralled by it: I felt like I had discovered someone who really knew what was going on and what they were talking about.
A couple of possible additions to the page which I'm still a bit unsure of:
...You may have noticed that all the posts and all the comments on this site have buttons to vote them up or down, and all the users have "karma" scores which come from the sum of all their comments and posts. Try not to take this too personally. Voting is used mainly to get the most useful comments up to the top of the page where people can see them. It may be difficult to contribute substantially to ongoing conversations when you've just gotten here, and you may even see
I wonder if those of us on the younger end of things will be dismissed more after posting our age and education. I admit to be a little worried, but I'm pretty sure everyone here is better than that. Anyway, I was a late joiner to OB (I think...
Handle: zaph Location: Baltimore, MD Age: 35 Education: BA in Psychology, MS in Telecommunications Occupation: System Performance Engineer
I'm mostly here to learn more about applied rationality, which I hope to use on the job. I'm not looking to teach anybody anything, but I'd love to learn more about tools people use (I'm mostly interested in software) to make better decisions.
Like, I suspect, most of the current reade...
Not sure yet. I have a fledgeling ethics of rights kicking around in the back of my head that I might do something with. Alternately, I could start making noise about my wacky opinions on personal identity and be a metaphysicist. I also like epistemology, and I find philosophy of religion entertaining (although I wouldn't want to devote much of my time to it). I'm pretty sure I don't want to do philosophy of math, hardcore logic, or aesthetics.
I found LW via OB via a Google search on AI topics. The first few OB posts I read were about Newcomb's paradox and those encouraged me to stick it on my blogroll.
Personal interests in rationality stem from a desire to eliminate "mental waste". I hold pragmatic principles to be of higher value than Truth for Truth's sake. As it turns out, this means something similar to systemized winning.
Hi. This is my first time to this website, and my third comment today. I've been listening to the show "Bayesian Conspiracy" and made some posts to the subreddit. So I guess I'm not a good lurker.
I was intrigued by Arandur's article entitled "The Goal of the Bayesian Conspiracy" which was essentially,
(1) eliminate most pain and suffering and inequity.
(2) develop technologies for eternal life.
The ordering here, that Arandur suggested, I thought, was quite wise. I recently saw the series "Dollhouse" and I fel...
Hello, please call me 'Taily' (my moniker does not refer to a "tail" or a cartoon character). I'm an atypical 30 year old psychology student, still working to get my PhD. I also spend a significant amount of time on thinking, writing, and gaming. Among other things.
One reason I am joining this community is my mother, oddly. She is a stay-at-home mom with few (if any) real life friends. She interacts on message boards. I...well I don't want to be like that at all honestly, and I've only on occasion been a part of a message-board community. ...
I’m 20, male and a maths undergrad at Cambridge University. I was linked to LW a little over a year ago, and despite having initial misgivings for philosophy-type stuff on the internet (and off, for that matter), I hung around long enough to realise that LW was actually different from most of what I had read. In particular, I found a mix of ideas that I’ve always thought (and been alone amongst my peers in doing so), such as making beliefs pay rent; and new ones that were compelling, such as the conservation of expected evidence post.
I’ve always identified...
The morality embodied by his superior man is neither, or a synthesis of the two, and while he says a good deal about what it's not I don't have a clear picture of many positive traits attached to it.
That's because the superman, by definition, invents his own morality. If you read a book telling you the positive content of morality and implement it because the eminent philosopher says so, you ain't superman.
Within the fictional universe of the Old and New Testaments, it seems clear that God has certain preferences about the state of the world, and that for some unspecified reason God does not directly impose those preferences on the world. Instead, God created humans and gave them certain instructions which presumably reflect or are otherwise associated with God's preferences, then let them go do what they would do, even when their doing so destroys things God values. And then every once in a while, God interferes with their doing those things, for reasons th...
Well, wait up. Now you're comparing two conditions with two variables, rather than one.
That is, not only is grandpa spontaneous in case A and button-initiated in case B, but also grandpa is a convincing corporeal fascimile of your grandpa in case A and not any of those things in case B. I totally get how a convincing fascimile of grandpa would "count" where an unconvincing image wouldn't (and, by analogy, how a convincing mystical experience would count where an unconvincing one wouldn't) but that wasn't the claim you started out making.
Suppose ...
Apparently we're speaking across a large inferential distance. I don't know about Tarskian sentences, so I can't comment on those, but I can clarify the 'anticipation controller' idea.
Basically, you're defining 'anticipation' more narrowly than what Eliezer meant by the term.
If you tell me that an egg is rough, I will anticipate that, if I rub my fingers over it, my skin will feel the sensations I associate with rough surfaces.
If you tell me that an egg is red, I will anticipate that when I look at it, the cells in my retina that are sensitive to long-wave...
The issue is that there is not a reliable "see-an-image-of-Grandpa button" in existence for mystical experiences. In other words, I'm unaware of any techniques that reliably induce mystical experiences.
Only as a hypothetical possibility. (From such evidence as I've seen I don't think either really exists. And I have seen a fair number of Wiccan ceremonies - which seem like reasonably decent theater, but that's all.) One could construe some biblical passages as predicting some sort of duel - and if one believed those passages, and that interpretation, then the question of whether one side was overstating its chances would be relevant.
Wouldn't this imply that witchcraft is effective, though ? Yes.
Ok, but in that case, isn't witchcraft at least partially "correct" ? Otherwise, how can they cast all those spells and make them actually work (assuming, that is, that their spells actually do work) ?
And sinful because witchcraft is forbidden.
Wouldn't this imply that witchcraft is effective, though ? Otherwise it wouldn't be forbidden; after all, God never said (AFAIK), "you shouldn't pretend to cast spells even though they don't really work", nor did he forbid a bunch of other stuff that is merely silly and a waste of time. But if witchcraft is effective, it would imply that it's more or less "correct", which is why I was originally confused about what you meant.
FWIW, I feel compelled to point out that some Wiccans believe in mu...
(Replying rather than editing, to make sure that my comment displays as un-edited.)
I should also stipulate that I am not, nor have I ever been, Will Newsome.
If I told you that God likes to troll people would that raise your opinion of trolls or lower your opinion of GOD
Which God? If it is Yahweh then that guy's kind of a dick and I don't value his opinion much at all. But he isn't enough of a dick that I can reverse stupidity to arrive at anything useful either.
Okay, thanks. I didn't mean to imply 'twas your own "specialness" as such; apologies for being unclear. ETA: Also I'm sorry for anything else? I get the impression I did/said something wrong. So yeah, sorry.
Aw, wedrifid, that's mean.
Is it? I didn't think it was something that you would be offended by. Since the mass voting was up but then back down to where it started it isn't a misdemeanor so much as it is peculiar and confusing. The only possibility that sprung to mind was that it could be an extension of of your empirical experimentation. You (said that you) actually made a bunch of the comments specifically so that they would get downvotes so that you could see how that influenced the voting behavior of others. Tinkering with said votes to satisfy a further indecipherable curiosity doesn't seem like all that much of a stretch.
Greetings, Will_Newsome.
This particular post of yours was, last night, at 4 upvotes. Do you have any hypothesis as to why that was the case? I am rather curious as to how that happened.
trying to convert them, which I am, but only half-heartedly.
You are not doing this in any way, shape, or form, unless I missed some post-length or sequence-length argument of yours. (And I don't mean a "hint" as to what you might believe.) If you have something to say on the topic, you clearly can't or won't say it in a comment.
I have to tentatively classify your "trying" as broken signaling (though I notice some confusion on my part). If you were telling the truth about your usual mental state, and not deliberately misleading the re...
I agree that there is physical continuity from moment to moment in typical human existence, and that there is similar continuity with a slow transition to a nonhuman form. I agree that there is no such continuity with an instantaneous copy-and-destroy operation.
I understand that you consider that difference uniquely important, such that I continue living in the first case, and I don't continue living in the second case.
I infer that you believe in some uniquely important attribute to my self that is preserved by the first process, and not preserved by the ...
It's conceivable that English could drift enough that EY's meaning would be unclear even if the texts remain.
In short, Crocker's Rule does not mean "I don't mind if you are intentionally rude to me." It means "I am aware that your assertions might be unintentionally rude, and I will be guided by your intention to inform rather than interpreting you as intentionally rude.
Right, I wasn't saying anything that contradicted that. Rather, some of us have additional cognitive burden in general trying to figure out if something is supposed to be rude, and I always understood part of the point of Crocker's Rules to be removing that burden so we can communicate more efficiently. Especially since many such people are often worth listening to.
IME, more willpower works really poorly as a solution to pretty much anything, for much the same reason that flying works really poorly as a way of getting to my roof. I mean, I suspect that if I could fly, getting to my roof would be very easy, but I can't fly.
I also find that regular physical exercise and adequate sleep do more to manage my anxiety in the long term (that is, on a scale of months) than anything else I've tried.
A sidetrack: People seem to be conflating AspiringKnitter's identity as a Christian and a woman. Female is an important part of not being Will Newsome, but suppose that AspiringKnitter were a male Christian and not Will Newsome. Would that make a difference to any part of this discussion?
More identity issues: My name is Nancy Lebovitz with a v, not a w.
ISTM that the two statements are equivalent denotationally (they both mean “each person is either my friend or my enemy”) but not connotationally (the first suggests that most people are my friends, the latter suggests that most people are my enemies).
If someone believed that no human and/or AI will ever be able to last longer than 1,000 years - perhaps any mind goes mad at that age, or explodes due to a law of the universe dealing with mental entities, or whatever - that person would be lambasted for using "immortal" to mean beings "as immortal as it is possible to be in my opinion."
That moderately surprises me. It's from "Sinners in the hands of an angry god" by Johnathan Edwards.
Oh, I'm sorry. Yes, that does make sense. Decision theory WOULD assert it, but to believe they're immoral requires belief in some amount of supernatural something, right? Hence it makes no sense under what my prior assumptions were (namely, that there was nothing supernatural).
Accepting the existence of the demon portal should not impact your disbelief in a supernatural morality.
Anyways, the demons don't even have to be supernatural. First hypothesis would be hallucination, second would be aliens.
Why is it recursively self-improving if it isn't doing anything? If my end goal was not to do anything, I certainly don't need to modify myself in order to achieve that better than I could achieve it now.
It matters for two things:
1) If we are trying to upload (the context here, if you follow the thread up a bit), then we want the emulations to be alive in whatever senses it is important to us that we are presently alive.
2) If we are building a really powerful optimization process, we want it not to be alive in whatever senses make alive things morally relevant, or we have to consider its desires as well.
That's a perfectly workable model of a computer for our purposes, though if we were really going to get into this we'd have to further explore what a circuit is.
Personally, I've pretty much given up on the word "sentient"... in my experience it connotes far more than it denotes, such that discussions that involve it end up quickly reaching the point where nobody quite knows what they're talking about, or what talking about it entails. I have the same problem with "qualia" and "soul." (Then again, I talk comfortably about some...
But never mind. We have different terminal values here. You-- I assume-- seek a lot of partners for everyone, right?
Nope! I don't have any certainty about what is best for society / mankind in the long run, but personally, I'm fine with monogamy, I'm married, have a kid, and don't think "more casual sex" is necessarily a good thing.
I can, however, agree with Eliezer when he says it might be better if human sex drives were better adjusted - not because I value seeing more people screwing around like monkeys, but because it seems that the way th...
I think cryonics, in its current form, is a terrible idea
What do you think of cremation in its current form?
Greeting Less Wrong!
My name is Dimitri Karcheglo. I'm 21, I live in Vancouver, Canada. I was born in Ukraine and immigrated to Vancouver with my family in 1998.
I found my way here via a recommendation from a friend i have in The Zeitgeist Movement. He recommended Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality to me, as well as the Less Wrong wiki/sequences. I've red HPMOR at least 10 times over now (I have a thing with re-reading. I don't get bored by it.) I've also read some of the material on the site (though not a lot yet. Just "map and territory"...
Hi,
I was thinking quite a lot for myself about topics like
and after discovering LW some days ago I have tried to compare my "results" to the posts here. It was interesting to see that many ideas I had so far were also "discovered" by other people but I was also a little bit proud that I have got so far on my own. Probably this...
Hi! My name is Jay, I'm 20ish, and I study mathematics and physics. I found this through HPMOR which came to me as a recommendation from another physicist.
I'm interested in learning logic, winning arguments, and being better able to understand philosophical debates. I'll be starting by going through the major sequences, as that seems generally recommended.
I have a blog, A Model of Reality , whose name seems particularly amusing now. It is so called because my main interest in scientific research is to improve the models for predicting reality (eg how corn ...
I'm interested in ... winning arguments ...
Ack, that won't do. It is generally detrimental to be overly concerned with winning arguments. Aside from that, though, welcome to LW!
You don't need an additional ontological entity to reflect a judgment (and judgments can differ between different people or agents). You don't need special angry atoms to form an angry person, that property can be either in the pattern of how the atoms are arranged, or in the way you perceive their arrangement. See these posts:
...I don't think a computer program can have any moral value, therefore, without the presence of a soul, people also have no moral value.
It's hard to build intuitions about the moral value of intelligent programs right now, because there aren't any around to talk to. But consider a hypothetical that's as close to human as possible: uploads. Suppose someone you knew decided to undergo a procedure where his brain would be scanned and destroyed, and then a program based on that scan was installed on a humanoid robot body, so that it would act and think like h...
Wow, impressing that nevertheless you've managed to become a rationalist! Now I would like to hear how you achieved this feat :-)
Mainly by having read so much pop science and sci-fi as a kid that by the time the mystical-experience things happened in a religious context (at around 14, when I started singing in the choir and actually being exposed to religious memes) I was already a fairly firm atheist in a family of atheists. Before that, although I remember having vaguely spiritual experiences as a younger kid, they were mostly associated with stuff li...
Hm, I don't know. Merely writing about the trip can never be as profound as the experience itself. Read e.g. descriptions of experiences with meditation. They often sound just silly. Furthermore there are enough trip-reports in the internet about experiences with psychedelic drugs, from people who can better write than I can, and who have more knowledge than I have. If you are really interested in mystic or psychedelic experiences, you can go to Erowid , which is one of the best sites on the internet if you are interested in this stuff...
Slight exaggeration, of course. I know that by 14 my ideas were very mature, of the type "humans invented gods to explain the mysteries of the world" or "A conscious mind will likely find the thought of nonexistence abhorrent, thus the idea of eternal life".
That's fairly impressive... for a human! ;)
But I might be wrong about what this forum is about!
Nope, you've got it spot on. Welcome! :)
Impressive. I've been here for over a year and I still haven't finished all of them.
Thanks! My friends thought I was crazy (well, they probably already did and still do), but once I firmly decided to get through the Sequences, I really almost didn't do anything else while I wasn't either in class, taking an exam, or taking care of biological needs like food (having a body is such a liability!).
...I'm curious — if someone invented a pill that exactly simulated the feeling of helping people, would you switch to taking that pill instead of actually helping
Hello,
I'm a software engineer working in Ireland, desperately trying to find something else to do in the area of science preferably. I've been a transhumanist for a while now and an atheist a lot longer so I'm finding less wrong very interesting as it appeals to my rational and empirical leanings.
I've been reading the sequences, they're fun to say the least. I'm learning a lot and I have a lot to learn, I'm looking forward to it!
For what its worth I'm a male and 27 years gathering experience from the west of Ireland.
Alicorn: I like e for the subject case, en for the object, and es for possessive, but I don't use them in meatspace or other forums as much as in my thoughts because it confuses people. I'll probably use them here. What do you think?
I'll use those pronouns for you if you prefer them. When I'm picking gender-neutral pronouns on my own I usually use some combination of Spivak and singular "they".
Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law. I'm a currently unemployed library school graduate with a fondness for rationality. I believe as a child I read most of Korzybski's Bible of general-semantics, which I now think breaks its own rules about probability but still tends to have value for the people most likely to believe in it.
I didn't plan to mention it before seeing this, but I practice an atheistic form of Crowley's mystical path. I hope to learn how to produce certain experiences in myself (for whoever I saw arguing about a priori certainty,...
Its certainly a possibility, ranging from the terrifying if its created as something like a central intelligence agent, to the beneficial if its created as a more transparent public achievement, like landing on the moon.
The potential for arms race seems to contribute to possibility of doom.
The government seems on par with the private sector in terms of likelihood, but I dont have a strong notion of that. At this point it is already some sort of blip on their radar, even if small.
Whites and blacks both have a cultural contribution to IQ. So to make your example work, we have to say that Smith and Jones both found treasure, but in unequal amounts. Let's say that our estimate is that Smith found treasure approximately worth $50,000, and Jones found treasure approximately worth $10,000. If the difference in their wealth is exactly $50,000, then most likely Smith was richer in the first place, by approximately $10,000.
In order to say that Jones was most likely richer, the difference in their wealth would have to be under $40,000, or th...
Sounds like you've given this some serious thought and avoided all kinds of failure modes. While I disagree with you and think that there's probably an interesting discussion here, I agree that this probably isn't the place to get into it. Welcome to Less Wrong, and I hope you stick around.
It might not work in another month or two, but the idea of "contrived infinite-torture scenarios" has high salience for LW readers right now. I got the joke immediately.
Thank you very much!
A small element of my own personal quirks (which, alas, I keep screwing up) is to avoid using the words 'argue' and 'debate'. Arguing is like trying to 'already be right', and Debate is a test of social ability, not the rightness of your side. I like to discuss - some of the greatest feelings is when I suddenly get that sensation of "OH! I've been wrong, but that makes SO MUCH MORE SENSE!" And some of the scariest feelings are "What? You're changing your mind to agree with me? But what if I'm wrong and I just argued ...
Well, if you make it impossible for you to play down, then that's a perfectly valid exercise of your control over your own life, isn't it?
Then you make it a tautology that "freedom is good", because any restriction on freedom that leads to an increase of good will be rebranded as a "valid exercise of control". Maybe I should give an example of the reverse case, where adding freedom makes everyone worse off. See Braess's paradox: adding a new free road to the road network, while keeping the number of drivers constant, can make every d...
More freedom is always good from an individual rationality perspective, but game theory has lots of situations where giving more behavior options to one agent causes harm to everyone, or where imposing a restriction makes everyone better off. For example, if we're playing the Centipede game and I somehow make it impossible for myself to play "down" for the first 50 turns - unilaterally, without requiring any matching commitment on your part - then we both win much more than we otherwise would.
Wow, I'm surprised to hear that two people referred to Consciousness Explained as obsolete. If there's a better book on consciousness out there, I'd love to hear about it.
Hi! I've been on Less Wrong since the beginning. I'm finally getting around to posting in this thread. I found Less Wrong via Overcoming Bias, which I (presumably) found by wandering around the libertarian blogosphere.
I should note that the ability to explain things isn't the same attribute as intelligence. I am lucky enough to have it. Other legitimately intelligent people do not.
Hi. My name's Kevin. I'm 23. I graduated with a degree in industrial engineering from the University of Pittsburgh last month. I have a small ecommerce site selling a few different kinds of herbal medicine, mainly kratom, and I buy and sell sport and concert tickets. Previously I started a genetic testing startup and I am gearing up for my next startup.
I post on Hacker News a lot as rms. kfischer &$ gmail *^ com for email and IM, kevin143 on Twitter, kfischer on Facebook.
I signed up for Less Wrong when it was first started but have just recently reache...
Male, 26; Belgrade, Serbia. Graduate student of software engineering. Been lurking here for a few months, reading sequences and new stuff through RSS. Found the site through reddit, likely.
Self-diagnosed (just now) with impostor syndrome. Learned a lot from reading this site. Now registered an account to facilitate learning (by interaction), and out of desire to contribute back to the community (not likely to happen by insightful posts, so I'll check out the source code).
I have been lurking LW and OB since summer and finally became motivated/bored enough to post. I do not remember exactly how I came to find this site, but it was probably from following a link on some atheist blog or forum.
I became interested in rationality after taking some philosophy classes my freshman year and discovering that I had been wrong about religion. Everything followed from that.
Interests that you probably do not care about: Gaming and game design in particular. I have thus far made a flash game and an iPhone game, both of which are far too difficult for most people.
Much of it is explained by the text that appears when you click the "Help" link below the comment. (Look below the text window at the right.) But to do those three things specifically:
Name: Matt Duing Age: 24 Location: Pittsburgh, PA Education: undergraduate
I've been an overcoming bias reader since the beginning, which I learned of from Michael Anissimov's blog. My long term goal is to do what I can to help mitigate existential risks and my short term goals include using rationality to become a more accurate map drawer and a more effective altruist.
Eh. Might as well.
Chris Capel (soon to be) Mount Pleasant, TX (hi MrHen!) Programmer
I've been following Eliezer since the days of CFAI, and was an early donor to SIAI. I struggle with depression, and thus am much less consistently insightful than I wish I'd be. I'm only 24 and I already feel like I've wasted my life, fallen permanently behind a bunch of the rest of you guys, which kind of screws up my high ambitions. Oh well.
I'd like to see a link explaining the mechanics of the karma system (like how karma relates to posting, for instance) in this post.
Hi
I am Ajay from India. I am 23. I was a highly rebellious person(still am i think), flunked out college, but completed it to become a programmer. But as soon as i finished college, i had severe depression because of a woman. I than thought of doing Masters degree in US, and applied, but then dropped the idea.Then i recaptured a long gone passion to make music, so i started drumming. I got accepted to berklee college of music, but then i lost interest to make a career out of it, i have some reasons for it. Then i started reading a lot(parallel to some pr...
I do not identify myself as a rationalist for I only recently understood how emotional a person I really am and id like to enjoy it before trying to get it under control again.
Note that rationality does not necessarily oppose emotion.
...Becoming more rational - arriving at better estimates of how-the-world-is - can diminish feelings or intensify them. Sometimes we run away from strong feelings by denying the facts, by flinching away from the view of the world that gave rise to the powerful emotion. If so, then as you study the skills of rationality and
I discovered OB in early 2007, after my interest in transhumanism led me to Eliezer Yudkowsky's other works. I care about preventing the future from being lost, and think that Eliezer is right about how to do this. I also care plenty about being less wrong for its own sake.
I don't feel like I have much to share in this thread; my beliefs and values are probably pretty typical for Singularitarian Bayesian-wannabes (atheist, ...
I find minds to be the most beautiful objects in the known universe; at once, natural and artifact, localized and distributed, intuitively clear and epistemically ephemeral the mind continually beguiles, delights and terrifies me. Of particular personal interest is a mind's propensity and capability for creativity and, separately, wisdom.
Like the majority of artists, I dream of creating beautiful and profound r...
I'm driven towards rationality by three psychological factors— first, that I love to argue on philosophical and related matters, secondly that I'm curious about most fields of intellectual endeavor, and thirdly that it pains me to realize I'm being less than fully honest with myself.
Ye gods, that sounds like a pers...
I discovered OB some months ago (don't remember how) and reads both OB and LW. For now, I am mostly a lurker.
I have been raised as a Catholic Christian and became atheist midwa...
Handle: Nanani
Location: Japan
Age: 25
Gender: Female (not that it matters)
Education: BSc Astrophysics
Occupation: Interpretation/Translation (Mostly English and Japanese, in both directions)
Goal : To Win.
I found this site through Overcoming Bias, and had already been lurking at the latter for years beforehand. When I first came across Overcoming Bias, it was for too difficult for me. I have since become stronger, enough to read most of its archives and become even stronger. I intend to keep this positive cycle active.
I must say that I hardly f...
I think I have to at least graduate before anyone besides me is allowed to write a thesis on my wacky opinions on personal identity ;)
In a nutshell, I think persons just are continuous self-aware experiences, and that it's possible for two objects to be numerically distinct and personally identical. For instance (assuming I'm not a brain in a vat myself) I could be personally identical to a brain in a vat while being numerically distinct. The upshot of being personally identical to someone is that you are indifferent between "yourself" and the ...
I never knew I had an inbox. Thanks for telling us about that, but I wonder if we might not want to redesign the home page to make some things like that a bit more obvious.
I’m a 19-year-old Nigerian male. I am strictly heterosexual and an atheist. I am a strong narcissist, and I may have Narcissist Personality Disorder (though I am cognizant of this vulnerability and do work against it which would lower the probability of me suffering from NPD). I am ambitious, and my goal in life is to plant my flag on the sand of time; engrave my emblem in history; immortalise myself in the memory of humanity. I desire to be the greatest man of the 21st century. I am a transhumanist, and intend to live indefinitely, but failing that being ...
Hello all. I'm Lauryn, a 15-year old Christian- and a Bayesian thinker. Now, I'm sure that I'm going to get criticized because I'm young and Christian, but I undertand a lot more than you might first think (And a lot less than I'd like to). But let me finish first, yeah? I found LessWrong over a year ago and just recently felt that I just might fit in just enough to begin posting. I'd always considered myself clever (wince) and never really questioned myself or my beliefs, just repeated them back. But then I read Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality...
Thanks Tim.
In the post I'm referring to, EY evaluates a belief in the laws of kinematics based on predicting how long a bowling ball will take to hit the ground when tossed off a building, and then presumably testing it. In this case, our belief clearly "pays rent" in anticipated experience. But what if we know that we can't measure the fall time accurately? What if we can only measure it to within an uncertainty of 80% or so? Then our belief isn't strictly falsifiable, but we can gather some evidence for or against it. In that case, would we say...
By the way, I wonder if someone can clear something up for me about "making beliefs pay rent." Eliezer draws a sharp distinction between falsifiable and non-falsifiable beliefs (though he states these concepts differently), and constructs stand-alone webs of beliefs that only support themselves.
But the correlation between predicted experience and actual experience is never perfect: there's always uncertainty. In some cases, there's rather a lot of uncertainty. Conversely, it's extremely difficult to make a statement in English that does not conta...
Hello!
I'm an 18 year old Irish high school student trying to decide what to do after I leave school. I want to make as much happiness as I can and stop as much suffering as I can but I'm unsure how to do this. I'm mostly here because I think reducing x risk may be a good idea, but to be honest I think there are other things which seem better, but anyway I hope to talk to people here about this!
Some of you may be members of 80000hours I imagine, so heres me on 80k : http://80000hours.org/members/ruairi-donnelly
Okay. In this case, the article does seem to begin to make sense. Its connection to the problem of induction is perhaps rather thin. The idea of using low Kolmogorov complexity as justification for an inductive argument cannot be deduced as a theorem of something that's "surely true", whatever that might mean. And if it were taken as an axiom, philosophers would say: "That's not an axiom. That's the conclusion of an inductive argument you made! You are begging the question!"
However, it seems like advancements in computation theory have ...
I'm referring to his being an admitted troll.
To be fair Will is more the big and rocky kind of troll. You can even see variability that can only be explained by drastic temperature changes!
Does phrasing the state of affairs as (2) instead of (1) have any effect on your anticipations?
If not, they're the same fact.
How so? I can only think of Straw Vulcan examples.
A subset of those diagnosed or diagnosable with high functioning autism and a subset of the features that constitute that label fit this category. Being rational is not normal.
(Or, by "can be said", do you mean to imply that you disagree with the statement?)
I don't affiliate myself with the DSM, nor does it always representative of an optimal way of carving reality. In this case I didn't want to specify one way or the other.
Ah, right, so you believe that the entities that Wiccans worship do in some way exist, but that they are actually demons, not benign gods.
I should probably point out at this point that Wiccans (well, at least those whom I'd met), consider this point of view utterly misguided and incredibly offensive. No one likes to be called a "demon-worshiper", especially when one is generally a nice person whose main tenet in life is a version of "do no harm". You probably meant no disrespect, but flat-out calling a whole group of people "demon-worshipers" tends to inflame passions rather quickly, and not in a good way.
I should probably point out at this point that Wiccans (well, at least those whom I'd met), consider this point of view utterly misguided and incredibly offensive.
That's a bizarre thing to say. Is their offense evidence that I'm wrong? I don't think so; I'd expect it whether or not they worship demons. Or should I believe something falsely because the truth is offensive? That would go against my values-- and, dare I say it, the suggestion is offensive. ;) Or do you want me to lie so I'll sound less offensive? That risks harm to me (it's forbidden by the New Testament) and to them (if no one ever tells them the truth, they can't learn), as well as not being any fun.
No one likes to be called a "demon-worshiper",
What is true is already so, Owning up to it doesn't make it worse. Not being open about it doesn't make it go away.
especially when one is generally a nice person whose main tenet in life is a version of "do no harm".
Nice people like that deserve truth, not lies, especially when eternity is at stake.
flat-out calling a whole group of people "demon-worshipers" tends to inflame passions rather quickly,
So does calling people Cthulhu-wo...
I like your post (and totally agree with the first paragraph), but have some concerns that are a little different from Bugmaster's.
What's the exact difference between a god and a demon? Suppose Wicca is run by a supernatural being (let's call her Astarte) who asks her followers to follow commendable moral rules, grants their petitions when expressed in the ritualistic form of spells, and insists she will reward the righteous and punishes the wicked. You worship a different supernatural being who also asks His followers to follow commendable moral rules, grants their petitions when expressed in the ritualistic form of prayer, and insists He will reward the righteous and punish the wicked. If both Jehovah and Astarte exist and act similarly, why name one "a god" and the other "a demon"? Really, the only asymmetry seems to be that Jehovah tries to inflict eternal torture on people who prefer Astarte, where Astarte has made no such threats among people who prefer Jehovah, which is honestly advantage Astarte. So why not just say "Of all the supernatural beings out there, some people prefer this one and other people prefer that one"?
I mean, one obvious answe...
Sorry - I used "Astarte" and the female pronoun because the Wiccans claim to worship a Goddess, and Astarte was the first female demon I could think of. If we're going to go gender-neutral, I recommend "eir", just because I think it's the most common gender neutral pronoun on this site and there are advantages to standardizing this sort of thing.
The difference would be that if worship of Jehovah gets you eternal life in heaven, and worship of Astarte gets you eternal torture and damnation, then you should worship Jehovah and not Astarte.
Well, okay, but this seems to be an argument from force, sort of "Jehovah is a god and Astarte a demon because if I say anything else, Jehovah will torture me". It seems to have the same form as "Stalin is not a tyrant, because if I call Stalin a tyrant, he will kill me, and I don't want that!"
Not quite. I only believe in "multiple factions of supernatural beings" (actually only two) because it's implied by Christianity being true.
It sounds like you're saying the causal history of your belief should affect the probability of it being true.
Suppose before you had any mystical experience, you h...
Speaking of mystical experiences, my religion tutor at the university (an amazing woman, Christian but pretty rational and liberal) had one, as she told us, in transport one day, and that's when she converted, despite growing up at an atheistic middle-class Soviet family.
Oh, and the closest thing I ever had to one was when I tried sensory deprivation + dissociatives (getting high on cough syrup, then submersing myself in a warm bath with lights out and ears plugged; had a timer set to 40 minutes and a thin ray of light falling where I could see it by turning my head as precaution against, y'know, losing myself). That experiment was both euphoric and interesting, but I wouldn't really want to repeat it. I experienced blissful ego death and a feeling of the universe spinning round and round in cycles, around where I would be, but where now was nothing. It's hard to describe.
And then, well, I saw the tiny, shining shape of Rei Ayanami. She was standing in her white plugsuit amidst the blasted ruins on a dead alien world, and I got the feeling that she was there to restore it to life. She didn't look at me, but I knew she knew I saw her. Then it was over.
Fret not, I didn't really make any more bullshit out of that, but it's certainly an awesome moment to remember.
Is that surprising? ... Don't people on this site rail against how low the sanity waterline is? I mean, you don't disagree that I'm more rational than most Christians and Muslims, right?
No, I suppose it's not surprising. I guess I misread the connotations of your claim. Although I am still not certain I agree: I know some very rational and intelligent Christians, and some very rational and intelligent atheists (I don't really know many Muslims, so I can't say anything about them). At some point I guess this statement is true by definition, since we can define open-minded as "open-minded enough to convert religion if you have good enough evidence to do so." But I can't remember where we were going with this one so I'll shut up about it.
...Do they do this by using tricks like Multiheaded described? Or by using mystical plants or meditation? (I know there are Christians who think repeating a certain prayer as a mantra and meditating on it for a long time is supposed to work... and isn't there, or wasn't there, some Islamic sect where people try to find God by spinning around?) If so, that really doesn't count. Is there another study where that question was asked? Because i
I was thinking more along the lines of "going to hell is a natural consequence of worshiping Astarte", analogous to "if I listen to my peers and smoke pot, I won't be able to sing, whereas if I listen to my mother and drink lots of water, I will; therefore, my mother is right and listening to my peers is bad". I hadn't even considered it from that point of view before.
To return to something I pointed out far, far back in this thread, this is not analagous. Your mother does not cause you to lose your voice for doing the things she advises you not to do. On the other hand, you presumably believe that god created hell, or at a minimum, he tolerates its existence (unless you don't think God is omnipotent).
(As an aside, another point against the homogeneity you mistakenly assumed you would find on Lesswrong when you first showed up is that not everyone here is a complete moral anti-realist. For me, that one cannot hold the following three premises without contradiction is sufficient to discount any deeper argument for Christianity:
Resorting to, "Well, I don't actually know what hell is" is blatant rationalization.)
I should probably point out at this point that Wiccans (well, at least those whom I'd met), consider this point of view utterly misguided and incredibly offensive.
I object to the use of social politics to overwhelm assertions of fact. Christians and Wiccan's obviously find each other offensive rather frequently. Both groups (particularly the former) probably also find me offensive. In all cases I say that is their problem.
Now if the Christians were burning the witches I might consider it appropriate to intervene forcefully...
Incidentally I wouldn't have objected if you responded to "They consort with demons" with "What a load of bullshit. Get a clue!"
When I put your first paragraph in that confabulator, it says "Vladimir Nabokov". If I remove the words "Vladimir Nabokov (Lolita and other books)" from the paragraph, it says "H.P. Lovecraft". It doesn't seem to cut possible texts into clusters well enough.
Besides, the way things are going, it's not out of the question that future versions of the Internet would all be written in Chinese...
I don't think so. The popularity of the English language has gained momentum such that even if its original causes (the economic status of the US) ceased, it would go on for quite a while. Chinese hasn't. See http://www.andaman.org/BOOK/reprints/weber/rep-weber.htm (It was written a decade and a half ago, but I don't think the situation is significantly qualitatively different for English and Chinese in ways which couldn...
I think you have causality reversed here. It's the redundancy of our languages that's the "feature" -- or, more precisely, the workaround for the previously existing hardware limitation. If our perceptual systems did less "filling in of blanks," it seems likely that our languages would be less redundant -- at least in certain ways.
(Maybe everyone knows this but I've pretty much denied that me and AK are the same person. Just saying so people don't get confused.)
What's the hypothesis, that the Bible was subtly optimized to bring about Rick Astley and Rickrolling 1,500 or so years later? That... that does seem like His style... I mean obviously the Bible would be optimized to do all kinds of things, but that might be one of the subgoals, you never know.
Searching and skimming, the first link does not seem to actually say that confirmation bias does not exist. It says that it does not appear to be the cause of "overconfidence bias" - it seems to take no position on whether it exists otherwise.
It's mentioned a few times in this thread re AspiringKnitter's evidence for Christianity. I'm too lazy to link to them, especially as it'd be so easy to get the answer to your question with control+f "confirmation" that I'm not sure I interpreted it correctly?
Hint: It definitely does not say that naturalistic mechanistic universes are a priori more probable!
Hard to know whether to agree or disagree without knowing "more probable than what?"
DIdn't think about it. He would have to consent, too. Fortunately, any interest in the issue seems to have waned.
Why didn't you suggest asking Will_Newsome?
Ask him what? To raise his right arm if he is telling the truth?
I asked about my presentation style because that's what I wrote about in the first place, and I couldn't tell whether your response to my comment was actually a response to what I wrote, or some more general response to some more general thing that you decided to treat my comment as a standin for.
I infer from your clarification that i was the latter. I appreciate the clarification.
Your suggested revision of what I said would include several falsehoods, were I to have said it.
The problem I have is that you claim to be "not optimising for karma", but you appear to be "optimising for negative karma". For example, the parent comment. There are two parts to it; acknowledgement of my comment, and a style that garners downvotes. The second part - why? It doesn't fit into any other goal structure I can think of; it really only makes sense if you're explicitly trying to get downvoted.
Not as far as I know, but you seemed pretty confident in that hypothesis so maybe you know something I don't.
What do you have in mind when you say "godly people"?
The qualifications I want for judges are honest, intelligent, benevolent, commonsensical, and conscientious. (Knowing the law is implied by the other qualities since an intelligent, benevolent, conscientious person wouldn't take a job as a judge without knowing the law.)
Godly isn't on the list because I wouldn't trust judges who were chosen for godliness to be fair to non-godly people.
Sorry for the misunderstanding about where you meditate-- I'm all too familiar with distraction and habit interfering with valuable self-maintenance.
As for heathens, you're from a background which is very different from mine. My upbringing was Jewish, but not religiously intense. My family lived in a majority Christian neighborhood.
I suppose it would have been possible to avoid non-Jews, but the social cost would have been very high, and in any case, it was just never considered as an option. To the best of my knowledge, I wasn't around anyone who saw reli...
I gather that meditating at home is either too hard or doesn't work as well?
I'm currently writing a Less Wrong comment which is probably a sin, 'cuz there's lots of heathens 'round these parts among other reasons
?
Have you tried yoga or tai chi as meditation practices? They may be physically complex/challenging enough to distract you (some of the time) from verbally-driven distraction.
I suspect that "not sinning" isn't simple. How would you define sinning?
If it likes sitting in a corner and thinking to itself, and doesn't care about anything else, it is very likely to turn everything around it (including us) into computronium so that it can think to itself better.
If you put a threshold on it to prevent it from doing stuff like that, that's a little better, but not much. If it has a utility function that says "Think to yourself about stuff, but do not mess up the lives of humans in doing so", then what you have now is an AI that is motivated to find loopholes in (the implementation of) that second ...
Well, for my own part I would consider a system of involuntary forced labor as good an example of slavery as I can think of... to be told "yes, you have to work at what I tell you to work at, and you have no choice in the matter, but at least I don't own you" would be bewildering.
That said, I don't care about the semantics very much. But if the deciding factor in your opposition to legalizing and regulating slavery is that slavery harms someone against their will, then it seems strange to me that who owns whom is relevant here. Is ownership in and of itself a form of harm?
I'm surprised. I'd heard Nietzsche was not a nice person, but had also heard good things about him... huh. I'll have to read his work, now. I wonder if the library has some.
OK. So, consider a proposal to force prisoners to perform involuntary labor, in such a way that society gains more utilons from that labor than the individuals lose from being forced to perform it.
Would you support that proposal?
Would you label that proposal "slavery"?
If not (to either or both), why not?
What do you see as the limiting factors?
The technical ability of current best-case cryonics practice to preserve brain structure?
The ability of average-case cryonics to do the same?
The risk of organizational failure?
The risk of larger scale societal failure?
Insufficient technical progress?
Runaway unfriendly AI?
I'm saying people can believe that they are Christians, go to church, pray, believe in the existence of God and still be wrong about fundamental points of doctrine like "I require mercy, not sacrifice" or the two most important commands, leading to people who think being Christian means they should hate certain people. There are also people who conflate tradition and divine command, leading to groups that believe being Christian means following specific rules which are impractical in modern culture and not beneficial. I expect anyone like that to...
I'm a married, monogamous person who would love to be able to adjust my sex drive to match my spouse's (and I think we would both choose to adjust up).
The Twilight books do an interesting riff of the themes of eternal life, monogamy, and extremely high sex drives.
Right - there's no misunderstanding, because the complexity is hidden by expectations and all sorts of shared stuff that isn't likely to be there when talking to a genie of the "sufficiently sophisticated AI" variety, unless you are very careful about making sure that it is. Hence, the wish has hidden complexity - the point (and title) of the article.
In Identity Isn't In Specific Atoms, Eliezer argued that even from what you called the "physical science perspective," the two electrons are ontologically the same entity. What do you make of his argument?
I really don't believe we have NOT(FAI) = UFAI.
I believe it's the other way around i.e. NOT(UFAI) = FAI.
Are you using some nonstandard logic where these statements are distinct?
God has been known to speak to people through dreams, visions and gut feelings.
In addition to your discussion with APMason:
When you have a gut feeling, how do you know whether this is (most likely) a regular gut feeling, or whether this is (most likely) God speaking to you ? Gut feelings are different from visions (and possibly dreams), since even perfectly sane and healthy people have them all the time.
...*There's a joke I can't find about some Talmudic scholars who are arguing. They ask God, a voice booms out from the heavens which one is right, and th
I'm talking exactly about a process that is so flawless you can't tell the difference. Where my concern comes from is that if you don't destroy the original you now have two copies. One is the original (although you can't tell the difference between the copy and the original) and the other is the copy.
Now where I'm uncomfortable is this: If we then kill the original by letting Freddie Krueger or Jason do his evil thing then though the copy is still alive AND is/was indistinguishable from the original then the alternative hypothesis which I oppose states th...
Yes, but how do you conclude that a risk exists? Two philosophical positions don't mean fifty-fifty chances that one is correct; intuition is literally the only evidence for one of the alternatives here to the best of my knowledge, and we already know that human intuitions can go badly off the rails when confronted with problems related to anthropomorphism.
Granted, we can't yet trace down human thoughts and motivations to the neuron level, but we'll certainly be able to by the time we're able to destructively scan people into simulations; if there's any...
Identical twins, even at birth, are different people: they're genetically identical and shared a very close prenatal environment, but the actual fork happened sometime during the zygote stage of development, when neither twin had a nervous system let alone a mind-state. But I'm not sure why you're bringing this up in the first place: legalities don't help us settle philosophical questions. At best they point to a formalization of the folk solution.
As best I can tell, you're trying to suggest that individual personhood is bound to a particular physical i...
There are a few interesting possibilities here:
1) The AI and I agree on what constitutes a person. In that case, the AI doesn't destroy anything I consider a person.
2) The AI considers X a person, and I don't. In that case, I'm OK with deleting X, but the AI isn't.
3) I consider X a person, and the AI doesn't. In that case, the AI is OK with deleting X, but I'm not.
You're concerned about scenario #3, but not scenario #2. Yes?
But in scenario #2, if the AI had control, a person's existence would be preserved, which is the goal you seem to want to achieve.
Th...
I'm under the impression that you've just endorsed a legal system which safeguards against the consequences of appointing judges who don't agree with Christianity's model of right and wrong, but which doesn't safeguard against the consequences appointing judges who don't agree with other religions' models of right and wrong.
Am I mistaken?
If you are endorsing that, then yes, I think you've endorsed a violation of the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment as generally interpreted.
Regardless, I absolutely do endorse testing the claims of various religions (and non-religions), and only acting on the basis of a claim insofar as we have demonstrable evidence for that claim.
But Muslims say the exact same thing, only in reverse; and so does every other major religion,
Yes, but they're wrong.
and no person has the right to impose their faith onto others. This system of government protects everyone, Christians included.
When it works, it really works. You'll find no disagreement from anyone with a modicum of sense.
These two quotes are an interesting contrast to me. I think the Enlightenment concept of tolerance is an essential principle of just government. But you believe that there is a right answer on the religi...
No I'd not particularly care if it was my car that was returned to me because it gives me utility and it's just a thing.
Right, but presumably, you would be unhappy if your Ferrari got stolen and you got a Yaris back. In fact, you might be unhappy even if your Yaris got stolen and you got a Ferrari back -- wouldn't you be ?
...I'd care if my wife was kidnapped and some simulacrum was given back in her stead but I doubt I would be able to tell if it was such an accurate copy and though if I knew the fake-wife was fake I'd probably be creeped out but if I di
if it acts exactly like a human would act in its place
... over some sufficiently broad set of places.
Our justice system should put in safeguards against what happens if we accidentally appoint ungodly people.
Currently, we still have some safeguards in place that ensure that we don't accidentally appoint godly people. Our First Amendment, for example, is one of such safeguards, and I believe it to be a very good thing.
The problem with using religion as a basis for public policy is that there's no way to know (or even estimate), objectively, which religion is right. For example, would you be comfortable if our country officially adopted Sharia law, put M...
That is a very good response and my answer to you is:
But I'm not saying you're wrong. I just don't know and I don't think it's knowable.
That said, would I consent to being non-destructively scanned in order to be able to converse with a fast-running simulation of myself (regardless of whether it's sentient or not)? Definitely.
This seems mostly like a terminological dispute. But I think AI that doesn't care about humanity (i.e the various AI in Accelerando) are best labeled unfriendly even though they are not trying to end humanity or kill any particular human.
I can't imagine a situation in which the AGI is sort-of kind to us - not killing good people, letting us keep this solar system - but which also does some unfriendly things, like killing bad people or taking over the rest of the galaxy (both pretty terrible things in themselves, even if they're not complete failures), unless that's what the AI's creator wanted - i.e. the creator solved FAI but managed to, without upsetting the whole thing, include in the AI's utility function terms for killing bad people and caring about something completely alien outside ...
... a theocracy ruled by Jesus, which some Christians (I'm literally so tired right now I can't remember if this is true or just something some believe, or where it comes from) believe will happen for a thousand years between the tribulation and the end of the world.
You are correct, some Christians believe that.
There are different Jewish doctrinal positions on whether shabbos goyim -- that is, non-Jews hired to perform tasks on Saturdays that Jews are not permitted to perform -- are permissible.
Not really, just playing along with MixedNuts talking about ridiculous Judeo-Christian rules. Vote up people for whatever you want.
I kew it too,. I thought it was common knowledge among those with any non-trival knowledge of non-folk Christian theology. Which admittedly isn't a huge subset of the population, but isn't that small in the west.
Just referring to the quote:
"Democracy is the worst form of government except for all those others that have been tried." -- Winston Churchill
Hi, I'm Lincoln. I am 25; I live and work in Cambridge, MA. I currently build video games but I'm going to start a Ph.D program in Computer Science at the local university in the fall.
I identified rationality as a thing to be achieved ever since I knew there was a term for it. One of the minor goals I had since I was about 15 was devising a system of morality which fit with my own intuitions but which was consistent under reflection (but not in so many words). The two thought experiments I focused on were abortion and voting. I didn't come up with an answer, but I knew that such a morality was a thing I wanted -- consistency was important to me.
I ran across Eliezer's work 907 days ago reading a Hacker News post about the AI-box experiment, and various other Overcoming Bias posts that were submitted over the years. I didn't immediately follow through on that stuff.
But I became aware of SIAI about 10 months ago, when rms on Hacker News linked an interesting post about the Visiting Fellows program at SIAI.
I think I had a "click" moment: I immediately saw that AI was both an existential risk and major opportunity, and I wanted to work on these things to save the world. I followed links and ended up at LW; I didn't immediately understand the connection between AI and rationality, but they both looked interesting and useful, so I bookmarked LW.
I immediately sent in an application to the Visiting Fellows program, thinking "hey, I should figure out how to do this" -- I think it was Jasen who responded and asked me by email to summarize the purpose of SIAI and how I thought I could contribute. I wrote the purpose summary, but got stuck on how to contribute. I had barely read any of the Sequences at that time and had no idea how I could be useful. For those reasons (as well as a healthy dose of akrasia), I gave up on my application at that time.
Somewhere in there I found HP:MoR (perhaps via TVTropes?), saw the author was "Less Wrong" and made the connection.
Since then, I have been inhaling the Sequences; in the last month I've been checking the front page almost daily. I applied to the Rationality Boot Camp.
I'm very far from being a rationalist -- I can see that my rationality skills are really quite poor, but I at least identify as a student of rationality.
Hey, I am in kind of in a similar situation as you. I've worked on making games (as a programmer) for several years, and currently I'm working on a game of my own, where I incorporate certain ideas from LessWrong. I've been wondering lately if I could contribute more if I did FAI related research. What convinced you to switch to it? How much do you think you'll contribute? How talented are you and how much of a deciding factor was that?
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