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JoshuaZ
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Why is Mencius Moldbug so popular on Less Wrong? [Answer: He's not.]
JoshuaZ6mo20

Thanks that was an interesting read. It seems like this may be connected to how there's been a lot of effort to distinguish feudalism from manorialism.

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Eliezer Yudkowsky Is Frequently, Confidently, Egregiously Wrong
JoshuaZ2y22

I'm upvoting this because the community could use more content commonly held views, and some people do need to treat Eliezer as more fallible than they do.

That said, I find most of your examples unpersuasive. With the exception of some aspects of p-zombies, where you do show that Eliezer has misinterpreted what people are saying when they make this sort of argument, most of your arguments are not compelling arguments at all that Eliezer is wrong, although they do point to his general overconfidence (which seems to be a serious problem).

For what it is worth, one of my very first comments [Was objecting to Eliezer's use of phlogiston as an example of a hypothesis that did not generate predictions](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/RgkqLqkg8vLhsYpfh/fake-causality?commentId=4Jch5m8wNg8pHrAAF). 

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The Waluigi Effect (mega-post)
JoshuaZ2y40

What does ELK stand for here?

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Optimality is the tiger, and agents are its teeth
JoshuaZ3y20

This is probably the best argument I have seen yet for being concerned about what things like GPT are going to be able to do. Very eye opening.

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How many philosophers accept the orthogonality thesis ? Evidence from the PhilPapers survey
JoshuaZ7y290
66.42512077294685%

This should not be reported this way. It should be reported as something like 66%. The other digits are not meaningful.

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Tsuyoku Naritai! (I Want To Become Stronger)
JoshuaZ9y00

I don't know of any broader, larger trends. It is worth noting here that the Rabbis of the Talmud themselves thought that the prior texts (especially the Torah itself) were infallible, so it seems that part of what might be happening is that over time, more and more gets put into the very-holy-text category.

Also, it seems important to distinguish here between being unquestionably correct with being literal. In a variety of different religions this becomes an important distinction and often a sacrifice of literalism is in practice made to preserve correctness of a claim past a certain point. Also note that in many religious traditions, the traditions which are most literal try to argue that what they are doing is not literalism but something more sophisticated. For example, among conservative Protestants it isn't uncommon to claim that they are not reading texts literally but rather using the "historical-grammatical method."

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Open Thread May 9 - May 15 2016
JoshuaZ9y30

MWI doesn't say anything about other constants- the other parts of our wavefunction should have the same constants. However, other multiverse hypotheses do suggest that physical constants could eb different.

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Open Thread May 2 - May 8, 2016
JoshuaZ9y00

That seems like an accurate analysis.

I'm actually more concerned about an error in logic. If one estimates a probability of say k that in a given year that climate change will cause an extinction event, then the probability of it occurring in any given string of years is not the obvious one, since part of what is going on in estimating k is the chance that climate change can in fact cause such an incident.

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Open Thread May 2 - May 8, 2016
JoshuaZ9y30

Mainstream discussion of existential risk is becoming more of a thing, A recent example is this article in The Atlantic. They do mention a variety of risks but focus on nuclear war and worst case global warming.

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"3 Reasons It’s Irrational to Demand ‘Rationalism’ in Social Justice Activism"
JoshuaZ9y80

When people arguing with VoiceOfRa got several downvotes in a row, the conclusion drawn was sockpuppets.

There was substantially more evidence that VoiceOfRa was downvoting in a retributive fashion, including database evidence.

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Trivial Inconvenience
15y
(+169)
Cryonics
15y
(+2874/-1133)
Information Cascades
15y
(+48/-38)
Cached Thoughts
15y
(+263)
37Astronomy, space exploration and the Great Filter
10y
68
13Tachyon neutrinos (again)
11y
10
33Dealing with trolling and the signal to noise ratio
13y
236
19Large scale problems, cognitive biases, and existential risk
14y
3
17[link]s Recent developments in life-extension
14y
1
12Curiosity, Adam Savage, and Life-Extension
14y
19
16Planets in the habitable zone, the Drake Equation, and the Great Filter
14y
64
21Edward Nelson claims proof of inconsistency in Peano Arithmetic
14y
116
7EFF stops accepting Bitcoins
14y
9
18A potential problem with using Solomonoff induction as a prior
14y
18
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