Back when this was a big part of my professional life, my reply was "everything takes a month."

Habit. It helps to get enough sleep.

Don't worry, it will have been available in 2017 one of these days.

So, on one level, my response to this is similar to the one I gave (a few years ago) [http://lesswrong.com/lw/qx/timeless_identity/9trc]... I agree that there's a personal relationship with BtVS, just like there's a personal relationship with my husband, that we'd want to preserve if we wanted to perfectly preserve me.

I was merely arguing that the bitlength of that personal information is much less than the actual information content of my brain, and there's a great deal of compression leverage to be gained by taking the shared memories of BtVS out of both of your heads (and the other thousands of viewers) and replacing them with pointers to a common library representation of the show and then have your personal relationship refer to the common library representation rather than your private copy.

The personal relationship remains local and private, but it takes up way less space than your mind currently does.

That said... coming back to this conversation after three years, I'm finding I just care less and less about preserving whatever sense of self depends on these sorts of idiosyncratic judgments.

I mean, when you try to recall a BtVS episode, your memory is imperfect... if you watch it again, you'll uncover all sorts of information you either forgot or remembered wrong. If I offered to give you perfect eideitic recall of BtVS -- no distortion of your current facts about the goodness of it, except insofar as those facts turn out to be incompatible with an actual perception (e.g., you'd have changed your mind if you watched it again on TV, too) -- would you take it?

I would. I mean, ultimately, what does it matter if I replace my current vague memory of the soap opera Spike was obsessively watching with a more specific memory of its name and whatever else we learned about it? Yes, that vague memory is part of my unique identity, I guess, in that nobody else has quite exactly that vague memory... but so what? That's not enough to make it worth preserving.

And for all I know, maybe you agree with me... maybe you don't want to preserve your private "facts" about what kind of tie Giles was wearing when Angel tortured him, etc., but you draw the line at losing your private "facts" about how good the show was. Which is fine, you care about what you care about.

But if you told me right now that I'm actually an upload with reconstructed memories, and that there was a glitch such that my current "facts" about BTVS being a good show for its time is mis-reconstructed, and Dave before he died thought it was mediocre... well, so what?

I mean, before my stroke, I really disliked peppers. After my stroke, peppers tasted pretty good. This was startling, but it posed no sort of challenge to my sense of self.

Apparently (Me + likes peppers) ~= (Me + dislikes peppers) as far as I'm concerned.

I suspect there's a million other things like that.

"So long as your preferences are coherent, stable, and self-consistent then you should be fine."

Yes, absolutely.

And yes, the fact that my preferences are not coherent, stable, and self-consistent is probably the sort of thing I was concerned about... though it was years ago.

You mean that it didn't happen here or in the global society?

I mean that it's unlikely that "the site [would] end up with a similar "rational" political consensus if political discussion went through".

Discussions about religion seems to me to be equally unproductive in general.

In the global society? I agree.

I can imagine that if the site endorsed a political ideology its readers would may become biased forward it (even if just by selection of readers).

Sure, that's possible.

But there is a possibility that that happened with the religion issue.

Sure, that's possible.

Also, let me cut to the chase a little bit, here.

The subtext I'm picking up from our exchange is that you object to the site's endorsement of atheism, but are reluctant to challenge it overtly for fear of social sanction (downvotes, critical comments, etc.). So instead of challenging it, you are raising the overt topic of the site's unwillingness to endorse a specific political ideology, and taking opportunities as they arise to implicitly establish equivalences between religion and politics, with the intention of implicitly arguing that the site's willingness to endorse a specific religious ideology (atheism) is inconsistent.

Have I correctly understood your subtext?

Yup, agreed with all of this. (Well, I do think we have had discussions about which political ideology is correct, but I agree that we shy away from them and endorse political discussions about issues.)

Aren't people on LessWrong quite good at solving their own problems?

Nah, not necessarily. Merely interested in better ways of doing so. (Among other things.)

Yeah, there's a communally endorsed position on which religion(s) is/are correct ("none of them are correct"), but there is no similar communally endorsed position on which political ideology(ies) is/are correct.

There's also no similar communally endorsed position on which brand of car is best, but there's no ban on discussion of cars, because in our experience discussions of car brands, unlike discussions of political ideologies, tend to stay relatively civil and productive.

What do you think? Would the site end up with a similar "rational" political consensus if political discussion went through?

I find it extremely unlilkely. It certainly hasn't in the past.

This comment taken out of context kind of delighted me.