Vecn@tHe0veRl0rd

It may be that the denomination as a whole is classified evangelical, but our specific church definitely doesn't feel like it (Speaking as someone with experience). All the pastors went to seminary, even the youth pastor and the social justice pastor and there is less of an established hierarchy than most evangelical churches. The pastor is not in charge of the church, rather the elected board is, and there is less emphasis on spreading the bible and more on caring for the community that the church is in.

Hey, thanks for posting this! It was a really interesting read. I do want to add though that church planting is not just a evangelical thing, my family goes to a centuries-old church that is part of is part of the free methodist denomination, and it has sent out multiple church plants over the past couple years. However, the method of planting tends to be somewhat different than what you described. The church has just one main pastor but around 6-7 other pastors, (although they might be called deacons in other denominations). They preach occasionally but m... (read more)

This metaphor was pretty great, I did the same thing as a child!

I find this hilarious, but also a little scary. As in, I don't base my choices/morality off of what an AI says, but see in this article a possibility that I could be convinced to do so. It also makes me wonder, since LLM's are basically curated repositories of most everything that humans have written, if the true decision theory is just "do what most humans would do in this situation".

I guess my point is that there are diminishing diplomatic/power rewards from increasing the number of nuclear weapons in your stockpile. While having nuclear capability is certainly important to be considered a superpower, the advantage the US gains over China by having a nuclear arsenal way bigger than the the Chinese one is, in my view, relatively small. China still has enough nuclear weapons to make launching missiles at it a really bad idea for a president of the US who wants to keep his job/his party's political power/his citizens safe (even including... (read more)

On the other hand, China is definitely trying to build those alliances and the global influence that you speak of. One example would be the belt and road initiative, by which China is pouring money into low-income countries in Asia and Africa. Also, China not having a nuclear arsenal as big or as advanced delivery systems for warheads is somewhat irrelevant, since it still has an arsenal that could destroy all of the major American population centers more than twice over.

I took the Dark factor test and got a very low score, but I kept second-guessing myself on the answers. I did that because I wasn't sure what my actions in a real-life scenario would be. Even though I had good intentions and I believe that other people's well-being has inherent value, I would put a high probability that I would get at least a slightly higher score if this sort of test was a real-world test that I didn't know I was taking. That makes me pessimistic about the data that the authors cite in this article. If (for example) "over 16% of people ag... (read more)

I agree, but so many other things are different in this fan-fic and Eliezer is smart enough that I wouldn't be surprised if it turns out to bel like that for a reason.

This is a good example of a time when it would actually be worthwhile to know about the philosopher's zombie debate. 

It says two comments for me before I posted this, so it looks like it has been fixed.

I think this comment is either incredibly stupid or extremely insightful and borderline genius. I honestly can't tell (although I'm leaning towards the former, and the karma seems to agree with me), and that scares me just a little.

I was also a little bit confused with that. My first thought was that it was a reference I didn't get?

I voted up every other comment starting from the top, then voted down every third one. I may or may not have continued. I have no Idea if anyone will ever see this, but if they do, I have been reading lesswrong for a long time and only now created an account to continue this chain.