I don't think debates really fit the ethos of LessWrong. Every time I write a comment it tells me to explain not persuade, after all. Debates have an effect of splitting people into camps, which is not great. And they put people in the frame of mind of winning, rather than truth-seeking. Additionally, people end up conflating "winning the debate" (which in people's minds is not necessarily even about who has the best arguments) with being correct. There was an old post here on LessWrong a while ago I remember reading where people were talking about the problems with debates as a truth-seeking mechanism, but I can't seem to find it now.
It... (read more)
Let me explain my understanding of your model. An AI wants to manipulate you. To do that, it builds a model of you. It starts out with a probability distribution over the mind space that is its understanding of what human minds are like. Then, as it gathers information on you, it updates those probabilities. The more data it is given, the more accurate the model gets. Then it can model how you respond to a bunch of different stimuli and choose the one that gets the most desirable result.
But if this model is like any learning process I know about, the chart of how much is learned over time will probably... (read more)
Does this mean we should stop making posts and comments on LessWrong?
We were not on the same page. I thought you were suggesting changes to the new re-hosted version of hpmor.com. Thanks for clarifying.
Thank you very much!
I am not mad at the LessWrong team. The reason I framed the title as an accusation was because I figured it was likely since I was sent to your website that you were responsible in some way, or at least were aware of what was going on. I now understand I was mistaken.
As for "improvements" if/when hpmor.com comes back up, I would like to note that I am against them, for the same reasons described in the post. I don't think it's obvious at all that some change to the old site would not be bad, at least from the perspective of people who prefer the old site.
Yes! It's just that the feel of the two websites are so different. And part of it may be my imagination. But it feels like the old HPMOR site is a simple elegant wrapper around the book, while on here it is the book is dumped into a website that wasn't made for it. Like the difference between a person wearing clothes, and someone inside of a giant human shaped suit that mimicked their motions.
I am very disappointed.
Now I'm sure you'd have to see it to believe it, but you see, just today I was rereading my favorite book, HPMOR, for the fourth time, and I clicked to go on to the next chapter, and to my surprise, there was no next chapter! Which is pretty crazy, considering there was a next chapter last time. Instead it just dropped me on LessWrong (on the HPMOR page). As an enjoyer of the old HPMOR.com site I just wanted to express my frustration.
Now I'm not trying to complain about LessWrong here. I actually like LessWrong, and sometimes I read posts on here. There are many forum and social... (read 351 more words →)
Upon reflection, it seems I was focused on the framing rather than the mechanism, which in of itself doesn't necessarily do all the bad things I described. The framing is important though. I definitely think you should change the name.
FiveThirtyEight has done something similar in the past they called a chat.