SkyDK

Thank you!!! I know it's been almost three years, but I've just discovered LessWrong (and my account) and highly appreciate your help.

I look forward to reading the article.

Wasn't visiting LessWrong with my profile for a long while.

Thank you for the detailed steps.

I suspect the down-vote is for the Taoist references where some LW'ers are heavily against references to Chi since they haven't found substantial evidence for its existence.

For me, your post is a thumbs up: I appreciate the applicability of what you wrote.

Thank you!

Great guys!

How'd it go? Did you talk about a 2nd meeting?

I just lost a long response, because I was naive enough not to check if the "More Help" link in formatting was an in-tab link. It was. Hence a short answer (my self-allowed free-wheeling time is almost up)

First of all. Thank you for your more fulfilling answer.

First admission: In the bright light of hindsight I see that my reply was unnecessarily snide.

Second admission: Yes, I actually saw your first as being slightly noisy. Perhaps because the post on "Why Our Kind Can't Cooperate" was so fresh in my mind. Your post fit very well into ... (read more)

If the context loses the safety property, sing out of tune, miss the beat and do some negative association exercises. In other words I regard it as overtly cautious to fear a cult sensation before the community is even at a community level.

But for those of us that are risk-averse (which should be none of us, but probably is the majority): Do you know of any community building exercises that do not have a potential negative backlash?

[... or is our kind doomed to be one of a kind? insert ominous music of own choice]

Could you enlighten us with your preferred approach to meditation then? I've had very positive experiences just with simple breathing exercises, but I'd definitely like to improve.

I'd have a hard time presuming anyone to be completely rational. But I'd have an even harder time understanding why I shouldn't point that out to someone who (presumably; due to them being here and all) wants to be more rational.

About your second point: I'm probably a bad choice for identifying your conformity filters due to the rather big amount of time I've spent at salsa and tango courses. Time which takes gargantuan proportions when contrasted to the awfully little time I've spent in Cthulhulian sects.

I disagree. Techniques for spreading rationality are highly rational to learn. Considering subjects such as Why Our Kind Can't Cooperate I dare say that it's almost essential for the project of disseminating rationality that LessWrong as a group learns how group dynamics work and how successful communities are built. If we consider being rational a good thing then we ought to make it as attractive as possible to feel as part of the rationalist group.

How is that rational?

a) I s'pose he does expect losses. Replenishing his ranks in the long term seems to be an acceptable idea (he is, more or less, immortal) b) Pity points? Perhaps the good guys held back against a pregnant woman? c) How long is she realistically out of the game, considering wet-nurses, time-turners and so on: half a year? d) If Bellatrix had gotten reckless, having a kid might have been a good way to rein her in a little bit..

... but honestly learning languages early on is a good investment for several other reasons. Not only for social and economical reasons, but also due to it becoming a lot harder to learn languages later on in life (please do correct me if this is a myth).

If you on the other hand stay learning languages during your youth, becoming fluent in a language takes less and less time (at least according to my own experience and that of all of the polyglots I know).

Also I'd say that being able to call on different aspects of your personality is a very valuable trai... (read more)

if you can be kind and moderate in your personal behavior, you can get away with incredible amounts of institutionally-mediated violence and extremism, especially to anyone who feels like they "know" you. Hypothesis: the most dangerous people are those who can give us the illusion of "knowing" them while they command an institution whose internal operations we don't see.

This suits extremely well with both local communities relationship to known criminals and to historical figures. Politics is a mind-killer and so on, but a lot of her... (read more)

My personal experience is that I've attached different parts of my personality to my different languages. I'm currently fluent in three and passable in two others. I notice that the part of my personality I attach to a given language depends on a variety of factors, but I can have a marked impact on it by focusing on my associations while learning the language. This is particularly true when I take the language from the classroom to an an experience of immersion.

In this regard I've also noticed that languages of the same root (for me: Danish, English and G... (read more)

Nope, pride definitely is more attractive for me due to the enhanced sense of curves. If this is supposed to proof something, I'd be highly suspicious of the results. I'm really bad a judging men, but I figure the pride one to be better there as well. The happy one seems to fake.

Yeah, but due to the politics is a mind-killer thing, we don't really comment on it... just like a lot of other political hints are left alone (at least on my behalf) and I try to focus on making predictions and figuring out where the agents in this story will go given their apparent rationality (or lack thereof) and value sets. That's the reason why I read this: it's well-written entertainment I can use to train my ability to predict and phrase said predictions. Plus I like to see theories put to practice.

(upvoted chaosmosis) How is utilitarian not cold-blooded? As far as I understand, utilitarians work by assigning utility values between different outcomes and choosing the one with the most utility. That seems pretty cold-blooded.

100k years worth of life > 2 minutes of intense pain and loss of 2 years of life.

I'm confused. I'm curious.

Can you see his point of view?

Do you understand why people (me included) feel that you under-clarify your arguments?

Do you realise that we (me, and I guess thornblake as well) do not mean you any harm? That harming you could not possibly help us (sorry, it could, marginally so, if it actually had a behavioural impact)?

Furthermore, it is hard to get social benefits from downvoting, since others can't see anyone downvote you. This does NOT have the same social effect as denouncing something in public.

I honestly didn't know about the posting delay, but I personally wouldn't assign a lot utility to it. And even less (close to none) to the ability to downvote others. In this case I think a 10 minute delay might help if it is used to check for illusion of transparency and/or lacking steps in his chain of reasoning.

But overall, thank you for pointing out the negative consequences of low karma. I'm reading up on it and I must admit I haven't found the right post (read the faq) to cover all the consequences. Still they seem minor at best.

One major problem concerns the legal rights of magical criminals; what if you're later found to be innocent? There'll be no way to reclaim their magic. Hence I doubt Harry would prefer this solution.