I've been rolling around the general argument about physical descriptions and qualia around for a while. As far as I can figure, the argument is something like,

• Nothing in the current physical descriptions we understand seems to have anything resembling an explanation of qualia like "the feeling of seeing red"

• Future physical descriptions must be essentially "grammatical elaborations" of the current ones. Any written book is stuck in the modality of the alphabet, no matter how long or innovative it is.

• Since the elementary "alphabet" of physics doesn't describe qualia, no theory of physics can either.

And my problem here is that this is an awfully confident argument that you get by doing absolutely none of the work you assure would be useless because of the argument. We haven't done the physical modeling of the process where qualia should be involved, and I think there's a coherent description of the experiment, even though we're very far from being able to do it in practice. We have little idea what qualia themselves are, so they're hard to approach directly, but we have lots of stuff on what humans are and we can do heterophenomenology. So, vast ethical and practical objections aside, the experiment would be simulating the physics of a live adult human from molecular biology up in a lit room with a red object being asked to describe what colors they see and expecting them to respond "I see red". And then trawling through the full simulation log of just what goes on in the simulated brain.

I see two ways this can go. If the experiment actually succeeds, we should have some very interesting data. Since the modeling proceeds from cells up instead of behavior down, it's very unlikely we have built a chatbot that mimics surface behavior. Either it's actually successfully mirroring how humans in the physical world perceive color, or it won't do anything because the copy of the human neuroarchitecture won't make sense with whatever the missing secret sauce is. So you might go full mysterian and claim there must be a secret sauce and the model won't work, but now you're committed to a falsifiable prediction that the experiment won't succeed. And the original argument about adding stuff not helping is a non sequitur in this case.

Or the simulation does work. And people do the further work of deciphering all the simulated neural processes. And then we have a readable physics-level explanation of all the stuff that goes on from the 700 nm wavelength light to "I see red". We don't know what's going to be in there. We haven't done the work, we don't know what the details will look like if they were spelled out in physics, but the "physics won't explain the important part" argument concedes this should be doable. And I'm really curious about being able to see this picture. Like, we're making our judgments now based on the "how things work" schemas we have now. It looks like there'd need to be some structural "how things work" schema that's unfamiliar to us in that description, so shouldn't we try to figure it out first instead of going "eh, it'll just be physics physics physics, who cares". What if after doing the work people will instead go "Oh, that's how it works! We had no idea," and we currently indeed do have no idea?

I'm thinking this might be something like computers (or fractals, or game of life). There's nothing novel about computers in terms of fundamental ontology, they're just patterns made of simple physics. Yet there's a whole discipline about studying what they can do and a huge package of brand new schemas and intuitions about "things doable with computers" completely unknown to top physicists and philosophers for hundreds of years, that people got by learning about a "just some more physics" description and thinking about it for many years.

LessWrongers dream of an unhurried future without having to fear death.

https://carado.moe/everything-is-okay.html is a dead link. Seems that all of the website is gone and purged from the Wayback Machine.

Nowhere on the whole wide internet works like that! Clearly the vast majority of people do not think that authors shouldn’t moderate their own threads. Practically nowhere on the internet do you even have the option for anything else.

Where's this coming from all of a sudden? Forums work like this, Less Wrong used to work like this. Data Secrets Lox still works like this. Most subreddits work like this. This whole thread is about how maybe the places that work like this have the right idea, so it's a bit late in the game to open up with "they don't exist and aren't a thing anyone wants".

It feels like there's a confusion of different informal social systems with how LW 2.0 has been set up. Forums have traditionally had moderators distinct from posters, and even when moderators also participate in discussions on small forums, there are often informal conventions that a moderator should not put on a modhat if they are already participating in a dispute as a poster, and a second moderator should look at the post instead (you need more than one moderator for this of course).

The LW 2.0 author moderation system is what blog hosting platforms like Blogger and Substack use, and the bid seems to have been to entice people who got big enough to run their standalone successful blog back to Lesswrong. On these platforms the site administrators are very hands-off and usually only drop in to squash something actually illegal (and good luck getting anyone to talk to if they actually decide your blog needs to be wiped from the system), and the separate blogs are kept very distinct from each other with little shared site identity, so random very weird Blogger blogs don't really create that much of an overall "there's something off with Blogger" vibe. They just exist on their own domain and mostly don't interact with the rest of the platform.

Meanwhile, LW is still very much in the forum mold, the posts exist in the same big pool and site moderators are very hands-on, give warnings and can be talked to. Standalone blog author tier people mostly don't seem to have come back to post a large volume of LW threads, and the dynamics are still very forum-like, so basically now there's just the chaotic extra element that any random person who started a forum thread can act as moderator and moderate other users as well as their individual comments on their threads, and this adds weird drama and dysfunction to the forum social dynamic. Most of the time it happens it'll also violate the informal rule that a moderator should not start moderating the dispute they themselves got initially involved in as a non-modhat poster.

EDIT: The third system mixed in is Facebook/Twitter style social media that's a "steppe" instead of a "valley", meaning that you have a steady stream of complete strangers coming in and out instead of a pool of a few dozen to a few hundred people who might have been around for over a decade. You want a very low friction ban mechanism on a steppe site since a lot of first interactions will be bad and usually indicate the drive-by stranger they're from is not worth interacting with. On a valley site the person interacting with you is much more likely to be tightly invested in the very local area, so blocking them is bigger drama generator.

Reddit and HN also get it wrong, but less wrong than LW: they show the comment and its subthread, but not the surrounding context.

You can click on the "context" link in a HN subthread view to switch to the one you want.

I zoned out pretty hard around the time they got deep into the korrigibility debate, and started entertaining myself by assuming that the ship's approach was actually The Outer Dark from Warren Ellis' Authority, told from a different viewpoint.

I'm having a hard time finding examples in that list that feel like they really match the idea. Most of them seem to be about people figuring out they're in a Matrix and then punching the Matrix Lord in the face. One example I remember which does go directly from realization to nonexistence is Orqwith in Grant Morrison's Doom Patrol. The idea that you can directly affect the physical universe, though not necessarily to the point of nonexistence, by messing with sufficiently complex calculations shows up pretty much as is in Greg Egan's Luminous.

I'm pretty sure people drifted away because of a more complex set of dynamics and incentives than "Said might comment on their posts" and I don't expect to see much of a reversal.

People dropping in on an unfamiliar website can have very hair-trigger reactions on any sort of AI art. I heard someone say they felt like immediately writing off a (good) Substack post as fake content they should ignore because of the AI art illustration at the top of the post. And I think the illustration generator is a built-in option on Substack because I see constant AI illustrations on Substacks of people who are purely writers who as far as I can tell who aren't very interested in art or web design. But this person wasn't familiar with Substack, so their brain just went "random AI slop site, ignore".