This sounds drastic enough that it makes me wonder, since the claimed reason was that Said's commenting style was driving high-quality contributors away from the site, do you have a plan to follow up and see if there is any sort of measurable increase in comment quality, site mood or good contributors becoming more active moving forward?
Also, is this thing an experiment with a set duration, or a permanent measure? If it's permanent, it has a very rubber room vibe to it, where you don't outright ban someone but continually humiliate them if they keep coming by and wish they'll eventually get the hint.
(That person is more responsible than any other single individual for Eliezer not being around much these days.)
Wait, the only thing I remember Said and Eliezer arguing about was Eliezer's glowfic. Eliezer dropped out of LW over an argument about how he was writing about tabletop RPG rules in his fanfiction?
There are already social security means-testing regimes that prod able-bodied applicants to apply for jobs and to spend their existing savings before granting them payments. If sex work and organ sales are fully normalized, these might get extended into denying social security payments until people have tried to support themselves by selling a kidney and doing sex work.
The shift we're looking at is going from program code that's very close to a computer's inner workings to natural human language for specifying systems, but where the specification must still unambiguously describe the business interest the program needs to solve. We already have a profession for unambiguously specifying complex systems with multiple stakeholders and possibly complex interactions between its parts in natural language. It's called a legislator and it's very much not an unskilled job.
I understand esoteric as something that's often either fundamentally difficult to grasp (ie. an esoteric concept described in a short cryptic text might not be comprehensively explainable with a text five times longer that would be straightforward to write by anyone who understands the subject matter) or intentionally written in a way to keep it obscured from a cursory reading. The definition of hieratic doesn't really connote conceptual difficulty beyond mundane technical complexity or a particular intention to keep things hidden, just that writing can be made much more terse if you assume an audience that is already familiar with what it's talking about.
I'm somewhat confused why Nolan Funeral Home is one of the organizations you needed to contact about panspermia contagion, via some random person's memorial page. Is this some kind of spam program gone awry?
Why not fill the detergent compartment immediately after emptying the dishwasher? Then you have closed detergent slot -> dirty dishes, open detergent slot -> clean dishes.
"It can't happen and it would also be bad if it happened" seems to be a somewhat tempting way to argue these topics. When trying to convince an audience that thinks "it probably can happen and we want to make it happen in a way that gets it right", it seems much worse than sticking strictly to either "it can't happen" or "we don't know how to get it right for us if it happens". When you switch to talking about how it would be bad, you come off as scared and lying about the part where you assert it is impossible. It has the same feel as an 18th century theologian presenting a somewhat shaky proof for the existence of God and then reminding the audience that life in a godless world would be unbearably horrible, in the hope that this might make them less likely to start poking holes into the proof.