Some days it’s hard to not start rooting for the paperclip maximizers.
Some days I actually do start rooting for the paperclip maximizers, but so far I’ve returned to not rooting for them in an hour or a day or two.
I’ve been chewing on the contents of this post for a week+ now.
I think the decision behind this post lurched my set point permanently towards, but not totally in, “root for the paperclip maximizers”, assuming habryka isn’t overridden or removed for this.
When a site that’s supposed to be humanity at its most rational removes one of its backstops against unimpeded woomongering in an attempt to get back authors who honestly seem happier and better-compensated writing on their Substacks, I’m tempted to cancel my pre-order of IABIED and shelve that one post that’s been rattling around in my head that amounts to “Given that CCP cooperation is essential for notkilleveryoneism to win, have any of you Bay Areans really thought about how an NGO push in the PRC is going to look to them, in light of all the other NGO/quango pushes that the US has been pushing that the CCP actively defends against because they obviously are bad for the CCP and/or PRC as a whole?”.
I change my mind too frequently on the paperclip-maximizer question to deactivate my account or let the domain registration for https://www.threemonkeymind.com/ lapse, but I’m updating strongly towards LW not being a place where I want to help raise the local sanity waterline, since this sort of work is actively being thwarted by the moderation team.
I don’t really think that these things have anything to do with each other (whether humanity should flourish vs being killed and turned into paperclips, and whether Said should be banned from LessWrong).
I also reject your characterization that we’re intentionally sacrificing epistemic standards to get back good authors. My story is that this is much more to do with my opinion that Said makes lots of demands of authors to explain things to his satisfaction, and yet often cannot seem (to me) to accept basic explanations of things either out of being dense or because of a commitment to not changing his mind (which he has endorsed sometimes doing for periods of at least a few days here).
Older version of this comment kept for posterity: A commenter that is epistemically committed to not changing his mind in the face of evidence and argument, and who demands people explain things to his satisfaction over and over and over again at the risk of being labeled ignorant and laughable, being banned from this webforum, has little-to-nothing to do with whether it’s better for humanity to have a flourishing future or instead to be turned into paperclips. Insofar as you’re genuinely unsure about whether you like paperclips a lot, perhaps buy some and find out? I mean I don’t actually think you might like paperclips that much, I think that you’re trying to say something about losing faith in LW but instead said something that doesn’t make sense.
Some days it’s hard to not start rooting for the paperclip maximizers.
Some days I actually do start rooting for the paperclip maximizers, but so far I’ve returned to not rooting for them in an hour or a day or two.
I’ve been chewing on the contents of this post for a week+ now.
I think the decision behind this post lurched my set point permanently towards, but not totally in, “root for the paperclip maximizers”, assuming habryka isn’t overridden or removed for this.
When a site that’s supposed to be humanity at its most rational removes one of its backstops against unimpeded woomongering in an attempt to get back authors who honestly seem happier and better-compensated writing on their Substacks, I’m tempted to cancel my pre-order of IABIED and shelve that one post that’s been rattling around in my head that amounts to “Given that CCP cooperation is essential for notkilleveryoneism to win, have any of you Bay Areans really thought about how an NGO push in the PRC is going to look to them, in light of all the other NGO/quango pushes that the US has been pushing that the CCP actively defends against because they obviously are bad for the CCP and/or PRC as a whole?”.
I change my mind too frequently on the paperclip-maximizer question to deactivate my account or let the domain registration for https://www.threemonkeymind.com/ lapse, but I’m updating strongly towards LW not being a place where I want to help raise the local sanity waterline, since this sort of work is actively being thwarted by the moderation team.
I don’t really think that these things have anything to do with each other (whether humanity should flourish vs being killed and turned into paperclips, and whether Said should be banned from LessWrong).
I also reject your characterization that we’re intentionally sacrificing epistemic standards to get back good authors. My story is that this is much more to do with my opinion that Said makes lots of demands of authors to explain things to his satisfaction, and yet often cannot seem (to me) to accept basic explanations of things either out of being dense or because of a commitment to not changing his mind (which he has endorsed sometimes doing for periods of at least a few days here).
Older version of this comment kept for posterity:
A commenter that is epistemically committed to not changing his mind in the face of evidence and argument, and who demands people explain things to his satisfaction over and over and over again at the risk of being labeled ignorant and laughable, being banned from this webforum, has little-to-nothing to do with whether it’s better for humanity to have a flourishing future or instead to be turned into paperclips. Insofar as you’re genuinely unsure about whether you like paperclips a lot, perhaps buy some and find out? I mean I don’t actually think you might like paperclips that much, I think that you’re trying to say something about losing faith in LW but instead said something that doesn’t make sense.