rsaarelm

The thing that makes this kind of threat particularly pointless, is that saying “I am on your side on all these other issues, but on this thing you are just wrong” is probably way more persuasive to people.

Do you know concrete cases where this has worked? The way I've seen this play out on public fora is that the conciliatory tone is interpreted as weakness and taken as a signal that it's cheap to go all-out on attacking the person for the heresy of arguing against the movement.

I guess the big difference is whether we're talking about one-on-one convers... (read more)

This still has the time traveller doing the destructive thing using the made-up physics of the time machine that causes the doom. The idea from OP is a much more magical one where the impossibility has always been present but things were working fine until someone found out about it, even though no new physical action that could plausibly cause the destruction is involved with the finding out.

The "All of these questions are deeply stupid" bit is what made me like the article and consider it worth reading, so mileage may vary if you smooth out all the stuff like that.

It sounds like Stapledon's scenario still has grown-up humans able to work on some sort of cutting edge stuff for their civilization. This is very different from the Culture, where humans are basically stuck as housecats and any new stuff is complex enough that only the Minds can tackle it.

If you had a correct causal model of someone having a red experience and saying so, your model would include an actual red experience, and some reflective awareness of it, along with whatever other entities and causal relations are involved in producing the final act of speech.

The model would quite likely amount to a successful brain emulation which would have a conscious experience like a biological human does when run. Though you get into some conceptual hairiness with whether it's a case that the model includes the experience qualia, or the execution... (read more)

The possibility of mastering some niche thing that has some genuine demand so that me doing it will be the best way to satisfy the demand. Even better if it involves coming up with something that hasn't ever been done before.

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

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 lik... (read more)

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".

Bad call. You don't exactly have an unlimited supply of people who have a solid handle on the formative LW mindset and principles from 15 years ago and who are still actively participating on the forums, and latter-day LessWrong doesn't have as much of a coherent and valuable identity to stand firmly on its own.

A key idea in the mindset that started LessWrong is that people can be wrong. Being wrong can exist as an abstract thing to begin with, it's not just an euphemism for poor political positioning. And people in positions of authority can be wrong. Kin... (read more)

How did you connect the objects you see as glowing with UV light specifically? Couldn't the glow be a hallucination or a perceptual rewiring like the persistent "breathing wallpaper" LSD users can start seeing, or some different physical property entirely? Can you see UV light emitted by machines that should be invisible like a person in the newscientist link claims he could after he got an artificial lens?

On leaving hospital, I decided I deserved a pint of bitter. Standing at the bar of my local pub, I noticed that their device for detecting counterfeit

Huh, apparently this is a thing. Retinas can see into UV, but UV light is normally filtered out by the lens.

Young adults can see UV light

Claude Monet got cataract surgery in his 80s and might have started seeing into UV with the filtering lens gone.

Medical article about cataract surgeries and UV protection

No idea how you could start seeing UV by rewiring your brain if your eyeballs still have the original lenses though.

what do you mean by “psychic pain”?

As far as I've understood, a big idea with dukkha is that you have an intense desire for things to not be the way you perceive them to be, even though you might not have any concrete means of changing things, and the psychic pain is your constant awareness that reality isn't the way you want. "Regret" and "yearning" both seem like good words to describe types of this, though you probably want to imagine the more extreme versions of both, not just mild wistfulness.

If you've looked into predictive processing, this sounds... (read more)