I was on an Android tablet, which I use in a laptop-like fashion (landscape mode, with keyboard) but which usually gets the mobile version of sites that try to be mobile-friendly.
The section presumes that the audience agrees wrt veganism. To an audience who isn't on board with EA veganism, that line comes across as the "arson, murder, and jaywalking" trope.
...Advanced rationality techniques, at least when applied to one's self-conception and life choices, are basically therapy. "Failures of basic rationality" are often better described as "mental health issues". Therapy is how you deal with mental health issues. People with mental health issues need more therapy/advanced rationality, not less! I've seen it hypothesized that one reason we have so many mentally ill rationalists is because people with mental health issues must learn rationality in order to function, at least to some degree tha
I'm curious if there's much record of intentional communities that aren't farming communes.
Oneida comes to mind. They had some farming (it was upstate New York in the 1850s, after all) but also a lot of manufacturing — most famously silverware. The community is long gone, but the silverware company is still around.
We should increase awareness of old fairy tales with a jinn who misinterprets wishes.
The most popular UFAI story I'm aware of is "The Sorcerer's Apprentice".
Sticking with European folktales that were made into classic Disney cartoons, maybe the analogy to be made is "AI isn't Pinocchio. It's Mickey's enchanted brooms. It doesn't want to be a Real Boy; it just wants to carry water. The danger isn't that it will grow up to be a naughty boy if it doesn't listen to its conscience. It's that it cannot care about anything other than carrying wa...
Why do you care if you're running in a simulation? Well, if you're a piece of malware, like a computer virus or Internet worm, you care whether you're being analyzed by an anti-malware researcher. If you're running in a researcher's lab instead of actually infecting target systems, you'd want to shut down so the researcher can't observe your real behavior and find out how to exterminate you. However, this means that if you can be fooled into believing you're running in a simulation when you're not, you can be made to shut down in the wild.
Harry Frankfurt's "On Bullshit" introduced the distinction between lies and bullshit. The liar wants to deceive you about the world (to get you to believe false statements), whereas the bullshitter wants to deceive you about his intentions (to get you to take his statements as good-faith efforts, when they are merely meant to impress).
We may need to introduce a third member of this set. Along with lies told by liars, and bullshit spread by bullshitters, there is also spam emitted by spambots.
Like the bullshitter (but unlike the liar), the spambot...
Caution: This is not just a survey. It is also a solicitation to create a public online profile.
In the future, please consider separating surveys from solicitations; or disclosing up front that you are not just conducting a survey.
When I got to the part of this that started asking for personally identifying information to create a public online profile, it felt to me like something sneaky was going on: that my willingness to help with a survey was being misused as an entering-wedge to push me to do something I wouldn't have chosen to do.
I considered — for ...
Just a few groups that have either aimed at similar goals, or have been culturally influential in ways that keep showing up in these parts —
General Semantics is possibly the closest to the stated LW (and CFAR) goals of improving ...
Maybe starting the Church of the Frost Giants and declaring cryonic suspension to be a religiously mandated funerary practice would work to that end.
I think actually reviving some ice mice might be a bigger step, though.
What does "successful" look like here? Number of patients in cryonic storage? Successfully revived tissues or experimental animals?
In many towns in the US, high school sports (especially football) are not just a recreational activity for students, but rather a major social event for the whole community.
This is an algorithm for producing filter bubbles, rather than for discovering or implementing community norms.
String substitution isn't truth-preserving; there are some analogies and some disanalogies there.
One possibility: Ensure that the benefits of AI accrue to everyone generally, rather than exclusively to the teeny-tiny fraction of humanity who happen to own their own AI business.
And "domain registration", which many web hosting providers will do for you. You can also start with the domain and then add services such as web sites and email, for instance via Google Domains:
Your claim seems to factor into two parts: "There exist charities that are just selling signaling", and "All charities are that kind of charity." The first part seems obviously true; the second seems equally obviously false.
Some things that I would expect from a charity that was just selling signaling:
So what was the wrong idea "geocentrism" about, then?
Some tribal lore tells us that it had to do with the centrality of humanity in God's plan; or the qualitative difference between earthly and celestial things: the sun, moon, and stars belong to the heavens; the earth is below them; and hell is under the earth.
But maybe it's more to do with a wrong idea of "revolving" instead. The ancients had no concept of freefall. When they imagined an object revolving around another, they may have imagined a sling-stone being swung in a sling. &quo...
Politically, taxing gasoline is utterly commonplace and accepted. Every developed country except Mexico does it, and every U.S. state.
It's been commented on before, once or twice!
...Hitherto [1848] it is questionable if all the mechanical inventions yet made have lightened the day's toil of any human being. They have enabled a greater population to live the same life of drudgery and imprisonment, and an increased number of manufacturers and others to make fortunes. They have increased the comforts of the middle classes. But they have not yet begun to effect those great changes in human destiny, which it is in their nature and in their futurity to accomplish. Only when, in addition to just
It is written by the sage Brandeis that "the remedy [to harmful speech] is more speech, not enforced silence."
In order for this remedy to be applied, someone has to actually compose the "more speech" that rebuts the harmful speech. This paper appears to be a set of recommendations for how to go about doing that; crafting "more speech" so that it actually constitutes an effective and relevant rebuttal against speech that advocates violence. I didn't notice anything in this paper that recommended suppression or censorship, or ev...
"I got caught lying — again — so now I'm going to tell you why lying is actually better than telling the truth."
Seriously ... just stop already.
It's possible to fool people's sense of "feeling informed".
For instance, LSD seems to often induce a sense of insight and significance ... including sometimes attributing cosmic meaning to the patterns perceived in the pebbles in a concrete wall.
Or, for that matter, as some of the psychological studies described in Cialdini's Influence or Kahneman's Thinking, Fast and Slow appear to have failed to replicate, what is there to say about the sense of feeling informed that accrued to many of us who took them to be insightful?
They may offer to install a group-sanctioned web filter, or otherwise let you outsource the information filtering to them.
Which cult currently does this? Do you know of any?
Scientology did this ... about two decades ago.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scieno_Sitter
Edited to add: This is presented as an example of how someone might have heard of "cults doing web censorship" as a story, without it being current.
As with "violence" itself, it seems like some uses of "bullying" strike me as being somewhat metaphorical rather than literal; but the folks using it those ways may not agree.
That said, my experience in school was that physical violence and "word stuff" could be combined arms in an effort to create misery or to drive someone away: perpetrators could use physical harm when they expected to get away with it; aggressive posturing (e.g. miming a punch) to remind the victim of the possibility of physical harm; and verbal attacks when they expected to get away with those.
Berkeley, and the Sunday Assembly one in Mountain View. I care more about the Berkeley one, and much of the reason I went to the other was to see what differences that group was doing with their liturgy. Much more sedate emotionally, although pretty energetic musically: they have a rock band instead of a choir; they opened with "Jeremiah Was a Bullfrog". They still did "When I Die" and "Do You Realize?" though, and their venue allowed candles. Also, I think they have a running gag about playing "Wonderwall" that I didn't quite pick up on.
"Just being stupid" and "just doing the wrong thing" are rarely helpful views, because those errors are produced by specific bugs. Those bugs have pointers to how to fix them, whereas "just being stupid" doesn't.
I'm guessing you're alluding to "Errors vs. Bugs and the End of Stupidity" here, which seems to have disappeared along with the rest of LiveJournal. Here's the Google cached version, though.
Things that persistently work for me at Solstice:
I think it goes beyond violation of norms. It has to do with the sum over the entire interaction between the two parties, as opposed to a single tree-branch of that interaction. In one case, you are in a bad situation, and then someone comes along, and offers to relieve it for a price. In the other case, you are in an okay situation and then someone comes along and puts you into a bad situation, then offers to relieve it.
This can also be expressed in terms of your regret of the other party's presence in your life. Would you regret having ever met the trade...
Are you looking for solutions at the "how healthcare should work in this country" level or at the personal "this person should do that" level?
I'm not looking for solutions right now. I'm looking to describe a problem, specifically at the individuals-in-our-community level rather than the national or state policy level.
Hold off on proposing solutions.
Do not propose solutions until the problem has been discussed as thoroughly as possible without suggesting any.
The problem: There are a number of folks in the LW-diaspora (and adjacent circles) who live in the U.S. and are living with disabilities and chronic medical conditions. Many of these people have benefited from increased access to health care in the past few years due to the Affordable Care Act. This increased access may very well be going away soon, putting these folks' health, well-being, and in some cases live...
"Surely someone more important than me in the organization has checked that this plan is legal before asking me to execute it."
It's really silly.
If we lived in the kind of universe where learning didn't help, where drawing more-correct conclusions and fitting your behavior better to the environment didn't help, then evolution and indeed biological life wouldn't work either. The kind of world where maps don't have anything to do with territories is a dead world, one in which there are no maps because becoming a mapper is worthless.
"Every communication is inaccurate" is inaccurate, but more-or-less true. "Every communication is equally inaccurate" is very much le...
This seems plausible to me. Also compare "torture vs. dust specks" (intended as a thought experiment about aggregating disutility over hypothetical people) with "the ticking bomb scenario" (intended as an actual justification for actual societies developing torture practices for actually torturing actual people).
With the internet of things physical goods can treat their owner differently than other people. A car can be programmed to only be driven by their owner.
Theoretically yes, but that doesn't seem to be how "smart" devices are actually being programmed.
Someone should pay to install and maintain a printing press and supply of ink and paper, installed in the public square, for all comers to print pamphlets and disseminate their views, ads, rants, wedding invitations, conspiracy allegations, and so on. Surely this would be an excellent and effective contribution to public discourse... and if not, to the wage of the cleaner who sweeps up litter.
- Legislating for individuals to be held more accountable for large-scale catastrophic errors that they may make (including by requiring insurance premiums for any risky activities)
If I blow up the planet, neither my insurance nor your lawsuit is going to help anything. Which is to say, this proposal is just a wealth transfer to insurance companies, since they never have to pay out.
This seems to be a complicated, abstruse way of saying "reading statements of knowledge doesn't thereby convey practical skills".
The 1916 case United States v. Forty Barrels and Twenty Kegs of Coca-Cola did not recognize Coca-Cola as containing an incipient intelligence, nor did 2013's United States v. One Tyrannosaurus Bataar Skeleton contemplate dinosaur necromancy.
Titles like this just represent the legal fiction for in rem cases, in which a case is brought against a piece of property — originally e.g. unclaimed property or contraband.
"discretion is the better part of valour"
This is a (slight paraphrase of a) quote from a character who is offering a rationalization for cowardice. It wasn't intended as a positive thing in the original work.
We do really conspire! Conspiring is at best a handy social and economic coordination activity. At worst it is a big bunch of no fun, where people have to pretend to be conspiring while they'd really rather be working on personal projects, flirting, or playing video games; and everyone comes out feeling like they need to hide their freakish incompetence at pursuing the goals of the conspiracy.
We usually call it "having meetings" though.