Zulip, Discord and Slack are all options as well

However, these are all very bad for searchability, archiving, multimedia content, and creation of permanent content of any sort.

In-general, bot issues are one of the top reasons for websites that accept user submissions either need to have a strict manual review phase, or be continuously updated with defenses.

Indeed. And what you’ll generally find is that mature, widely-used platforms tend to have many and varied tools for dealing with this sort of thing, whereas if you build custom software, you end up having to handle many more edge cases, attack types, etc., than you’d expected (because it’s very hard to think of all such possibilities in advance), and the project just balloons massively due to this.

(For example, Simple Machines Forum—which runs Data Secrets Lox, and which I, on the whole, do not recommend—has all sorts of options for gating user registration behind verification emails / manual moderator approval / captcha / verification questions / etc.; it has moderation tools, including settings that let you enforce per-post approval, on a per-subforum basis; it has a karma system; it has built-in GDPR compliance features; and all of this before you consider all the optional modifications that are available… and SMF is not even one of the better platforms in this category! How much development work would it take a small team to get a discussion forum platform to this state? How much work would it take even to just build the core functionality plus the moderation/security/anti-spam tools…?)

I don’t agree with most of this.

I agree with this part:

I would advise against setting up the software for yourself (unless this is the type of thing you also do for a job)

Yes, if you are not a “tech person” / programmer / engineer of some sort / otherwise have experience with software, you should not set this sort of thing up yourself. You should find/hire someone to do it for you. That is not difficult.

I disagree with the rest of what you say.

Choosing a free solution that is well-maintained is better than rolling your own. A standardized solution plus standardized exploits plus standardized mitigations to those exploits is better than a custom solution.

Basically, remember the situation when one person practically took down Less Wrong, and it had to be reprogrammed from scratch, because updating the original Reddit codebase would be too much work? Similar thing can happen when you use a free solution, and defending against it can turn out to be too much work.

First of all, as I recall, that wasn’t an “exploit” in the usual “software vulnerability” sense. Perhaps someone from the LW team who was around back then can better describe the details, but as I understand it, it was a design flaw in the “if someone does this bad thing, we have no good tools to catch them and/or prevent someone from doing it” sense. There is no reason whatsoever why a custom solution can’t have arbitrarily many such design flaws, and such an “exploit” in no way relies on having access to the source code or… anything like that.

And—again, to my recollection—old Less Wrong was never “hacked”.

But more importantly, the reason why any of this was a problem at all is that old LW used the old Reddit codebase—that is, one which had been deprecated and was no longer maintained. Indeed, it is a bad idea to choose such a platform, if you do not have a dedicated engineer to service it! This is why you should choose something popular and well-maintained.

For example, I linked MyBB in my earlier comment. It is updated regularly, and the developers clearly take security very seriously. I don’t know how much money you’d have to spend to get this degree of protection in a custom solution, but it sure ain’t a small number.

When you speak of standardized exploits to standardized solutions, I expect that you have Wordpress in mind, which is infamous for its exploitability (although I am unsure to what extent that reputation is still accurate; it may be an outdated characterization). But most web forums (which, note, Wordpress is not) get hacked approximately never. Ones based on well-designed, well-maintained, popular software like MyBB, even less so.

I also disagree with the advice to “use some cheap and simple solution that can (and will) be thrown away later”. In my experience, such platform choices tend to be quite “sticky”, and migration is often painful, expensive, and time-consuming. That is not to say that you should never migrate to a custom solution (although I am very skeptical about OP’s use case requiring anything more advanced than a good PHP bulletin board)… but even if you expect that you’ll want to migrate, it is far better to migrate from a basically working site which merely lacks some features you want, or has some annoying limitations, etc., than to migrate from a site which has broken or been hacked or otherwise exploded.

The fact is that a decent PHP-bulletin-board-type platform already is “a cheap and simple solution”. (Which can, of course, be thrown away later, but doesn’t have to be.) Trying to go even cheaper is setting yourself up for pain later on.

That’s true, but I’m not aware of one that does this combo and is good (uses a good forum software, is reliable, etc.). Are you?

Re-construction of Pathfinder game mechanics in setting

(Done poorly)

Thanks!

I agree that a link to a more substantive writeup would be very good… it’s hard to know what to make of the claim that “Pianists with a long professional experience show a statistically significant preference for the aurally tuned grand”, given that there were only 8 such pianists and 2 pianos (one tuned one way, one tuned the other way).

… also, this information comes to use from the website of this “entropy piano tuner”, which seems… well, I’d like to see another source, at least.

(Apparently, the creators of this “EPT” are themselves affiliated with the University of Physics Würzburg, which certainly explains how/why they got the University of Music Würzburg involved in this test.)

Have you (or has anyone) ever done double-blind listening tests to determine whether in fact anyone can tell the difference in such cases?

The problem with economics, however, is that while it’s got theories, they are, by and large, not theories about humans.

The discipline which was, at least, intended to provide the theoretical grounding for psychology as a whole was evolutionary psychology. The best summary of the motivation for, and conceptual basis of, evo-psych is the following, written by great cognitive psychologist Roger Shepard in his paper “The Perceptual Organization of Colors: An Adaptation to Regularities of the Terrestrial World?” (1992; this paper was included as a chapter in The Adapted Mind, probably the most import text in evo psych):

STRUCTURE IN HUMAN PERCEPTION AND COGNITION IN GENERAL

For over a century, psychological researchers have been probing the structures and processes of perception, memory, and thought that mediate the behaviors of humans and other animals. Typically, this probing has taken the form of behavioral experiments suggested by evidence from one or more of three sources: (a) introspections into one’s own experience and inner processes, (b) information gleaned about the anatomy or physiology of the underlying physical mechanisms, and (c) results obtained from previous behavioral studies. More recently, in seeking to understand not only the nature but also the origins of psychological principles, some of us have been turning to a fourth source for guidance—namely, to the ecological properties of the world in which we have evolved and to the advantages to be realized by individuals who have genetically internalized representations of those properties.

Taken by themselves, findings based on introspective, behavioral, and physiological evidence alike, however well established and mutually consistent they may be, remain as little more than “brute facts” about the human or animal subjects studied. What such findings reveal might be merely arbitrary or ad hoc properties of the particular collection of terrestrial species investigated. Even our own perceptual and cognitive capabilities, as much as our own bodily sizes and shapes, may be the products of a history of more or less accidental circumstances peculiar to just one among uncounted evolutionary lines. Certainly, these capabilities do not appear to be wholly dictated by what is physically possible.

The following are just a few of the easily stated and well known of our perceptual/cognitive limitations, as these have been demonstrated under highly controlled but nonnaturalistic laboratory conditions:

1. Although a physical measuring instrument can reliably identify a vast number of absolute levels of a stimulus, we reliably identify only about seven (Miller, 1956).
2. Although a physical recording instrument can register a vast number of dimensions of variation of the spectral composition of light, the colors we experience vary, as I have already noted, along only three independent dimensions (Helmholtz, 1856–1866; Young, 1807).
3. Although the red and violet spectral colors differ the most widely in physical wavelength, these colors appear more similar to each other than either does to the green of an intermediate wavelength (leading, as noted, to Newton’s color circle).
4. Although a camera can record and indefinitely preserve an entire scene in a millisecond blink of a shutter, the “iconic” image that our visual system retains from a single brief exposure decays in less than a second and, during this time, we are able to encode only about four or five items for more permanent storage (Sperling, 1960).
5. Although a computer can store an essentially unlimited number of unrelated items for subsequent retrieval, following a single presentation, we can reliably recall a list of no more than about seven items (Miller, 1956).
6. Although a computer could detect correlations between events separated by any specified time interval and in either order of occurrence, in virtually all animals with nervous systems, classical conditioning generally requires that the conditioned stimulus last for a short time and either be simultaneous with the unconditioned stimulus or precede it by no more than a few seconds (Pavlov, 1927, 1928).
7. Although a computer can swiftly and errorlessly carry out indefinitely protracted sequences of abstract logical operations, we are subject to systematic errors in performing the simplest types of logical inferences (e.g., Tversky & Kahneman, 1974; Wason & Johnson-Laird, 1972; Woodworth & Sells, 1935)—at least when these inferences are not of the kind that were essential to the fitness of our hunter-gatherer ancestors during the Pleistocene era (Cosmides, 1989).

Our performance in a natural setting is, however, a very different matter. There, our perceptual and cognitive capabilities vastly exceed the capabilities of even the most advanced artificial systems. We readily parse complex and changing visual scenes and auditory streams into spatially localized external objects and sound sources. We classify those objects and sources into natural kinds despite appreciable variation in the individual instances and their contexts, positions, or conditions of illumination. We infer the likely ensuing behaviors of such natural objects—including the recognition of animals and anticipation of their approach or retreat, the recognition of faces and interpretation of their expressions, and the identification of voices and interpretation of their meanings. We recode and transfer, from one individual to another, information about arbitrary or possible states of affairs by means of a finite set of symbols (phonemes or corresponding written characters). And we plan for future courses of action and devise creative solutions to an open class of real-world problems.

To the extent that psychological science fails to identify nonarbitrary reasons or sources for these perceptual/cognitive limitations and for these perceptual/cognitive capabilities, this science will remain a merely descriptive science of this or that particular terrestrial species. This is true even if we are able to show that these limitations and capabilities are consequences of the structures of underlying neurophysiological mechanisms. Those neurophysiological structures can themselves be deemed nonarbitrary only to the extent that they can be seen to derive from some ultimately nonarbitrary source.

Where, then, should we look for such a nonarbitrary source? The answer can only be, “In the world.” All niches capable of supporting the evolution and maintenance of intelligent life, though differing in numerous details, share some general—perhaps even universal—properties. It is to these properties that we must look for the ultimate, nonarbitrary sources of the regularities that we find in perception/cognition as well as in its underlying neurophysiological substrate.

Some of the properties that I have in mind here are the following (see Shepard, 1987a, 1987b, 1988, 1989): Space is three-dimensional, locally Euclidean, and endowed with a gravitationally conferred unique upward direction. Time is one-dimensional and endowed with a thermodynamically conferred unique forward direction. Periods of relative warmth and light (owing to the conservation of angular momentum of planetary rotation) regularly alternate with periods of relative coolness and darkness. And objects having an important consequence are of a particular natural kind and therefore correspond to a generally compact connected region in the space of possible objects—however much those objects may vary in their sensible properties (of size, shape, color, odor, motion, and so on).

Among the genes arising through random mutations, then, natural selection must have favored genes not only on the basis of how well they propagated under the special circumstances peculiar to the ecological niche currently occupied, but also, as I have argued previously (e.g., Shepard, 1987a), even more consistently in the long run, according to how well they propagate under the general circumstances common to ail ecological niches. For, as an evolutionary line branches into each new niche, the selective pressures on gene propagation that are guaranteed to remain unchanged are just those pressures that are common to all niches.

(Shepard then goes on to describe the deep questions which underlie his own work on color perception, one of which the rest of the paper is dedicated to examining and answering. I highly recommend reading the whole thing.)

Sure. Now, as far as I understand it, whether the extrapolated volition of humanity will even cohere is an open question (on any given extrapolation method; we set aside the technical question of selecting or constructing such a method).

So Eli Tyre’s claim seems to be something like: on [ all relevant / the most likely / otherwise appropriately selected ] extrapolation methods, (a) humanity’s EV will cohere, (b) it will turn out to endorse the specific things described (dismantling of all governments, removing the supply of factory farmed meat, dictating how people should raise their children).

Right?