Alexandros

• Alexandros 11 Dec 2008 19:40 UTC

  5 points

  on: What I Think, If Not Why

  Slightly off the main topic but nearer to Robin’s response:

  Eliezer, how do we know that human good-ness scales? How do we know that, even if corectly implemented, applying it to a near-infinitely capable entity won’t yield something equally monstrous as a paperclipper? Perhaps our sense of good-ness is meaningful only at or near our current level of capability?

• Alexandros 23 Apr 2009 21:42 UTC

  5 points

  in reply to: John_Maxwell’s comment on: The ideas you’re not ready to post

  I think a very straightforward contradiction is here: http://​​skepticsannotatedbible.com/​​contra/​​horsemen.html

  2 Samuel and 1 Chronicles are supposed to be parallels, telling the same story. Yet one of them probably lost or gained a zero along the way. Many christians that see this are foreced to retreat to a more ‘soft’ interpretation of the bible that allows for errors in transactiption etc. It’s the closest to a quick ‘n’ dirty sledgehammer I have ever had. And a folow-up: Why hasn’t this been discussed in your church? Surely, a group of truthseekers wouldn’t shy away from such fundamental criticisms, even to diffuse them.

• Alexandros 24 Apr 2009 16:00 UTC

  0 points

  in reply to: Paul Crowley’s comment on: Where are we?

  Guildford, UK. Definitely up for any London meetups.

• Alexandros 24 Apr 2009 21:21 UTC

  2 points

  on: Wel­come to Less Wrong!

  • Handle: Alexandros

  • Name: Alexandros Marinos

  • Location: Guildford, UK

  • Age: 27

  • Gender: Male

  • Education/​Occupation: Currently in 3rd year of PhD in Computing

  • Links: Blog, FriendFeed

  Hi all,

  I spent the first 25 years of my life in a christian quasi-fundamentalist environment. As time went by I was increasingly struggling to reach a consistent mindset within the christian belief-constraints. Over time, I kept removing elements of the belief system while nominally retaining the fundamentals even if simply as shells. At some point, I lost someone deeply important to me due to not providing her definition of a spiritual relationship, a situation similar to MBlume’s even if predating my explicit conversion to atheism. This led me to distance myself from the christian circles, as I considered being truly accepted without effectively leading a double life an impossibility. About a year later, discovering Eliezer’s writings provided me with the mature articulation of many thoughts that had existed in embryonic unexpressed form in my mind and added many others. In this sense it provided the coup de grâce to my theistic beliefs.

  Simultaneously to the above, I am a programmer who has not seriously written code in the last three years. This is because I have hit on a problem the solution to which I need to thoroughly formulate before resuming my efforts. The essence of the problem is that whenever I code, my intuition is to take soft-coding to the extreme. That is, I see each (algorithm/​process/​program) as a compilation of items of source knowledge and try to factor each item out. Taken to its logical conclusion, this leads to something that could be called knowledge-oriented programming or some such. I did not consider this related to artificial intelligence but I am now not entirely certain.

  Additionally, I am involved in Digital Ecosystem research, what I consider the effort to make control the property of networks rather than individual agents in the network. As an extension of this field, is my interest in social computing and the goal to make an unmoderated online community that allows freedom from coercion to its members while at the same time is able to collectively control itself. However, among the three, if I had to state only one goal, it would certainly be the effort to achieve ‘extreme soft coding’

  I recently have grown increasingly unsatisfied by the contents of my feed reader, I find in this community a higher a satisfaction-to-noise ratio than even Hacker News, and intend to try and participate as much as I can, although I don’t expect to have any major contributions any time soon.

• Alexandros 25 Apr 2009 12:13 UTC

  7 points

  on: In­stru­men­tal vs. Epistemic—A Bardic Perspective

  When we need to enlist the help of our subconscious, it seems there is a need for useful deceptions… The reason this seems counterintuitive may be that we consider ourselves to be operating directly on physical and social reality, but we are not. We are going through a convoluted stack of legacy hardware that is antiquated but powerful. To make things worse, the abstractions it uses are broken. So if a parameter is ‘Current Status In Tribe’, this makes no sense today, for one thing, there is no tribe. However we know that inserting the value ‘high’ in that slot produces roughly desirable outcomes.

  In that sense, the thought ‘I am dominant’ is not one that is directed to the conscious. We don’t use it to calibrate our model of reality. It is directed towards the legacy stack. In that sense it may be thought to be a meaningless parameter of purely instrumental use. However the legacy junk is a bit smarter than that, you need to believe it to some degree. Wait… does this mean doublethink can be a useful tool?

  I think I see where you are going with the dark side reference.

• Alexandros 30 Apr 2009 20:54 UTC

  7 points

  on: Ra­tion­al­ist Role in the In­for­ma­tion Age

  Correct me if I am wrong and forgive the ultra-condensation, are you proposing a type of rationalist wikipedia where instead of NPOV we would have an RPOV (rational point of view) policy? It does sound very interesting.

• Alexandros 30 Apr 2009 22:11 UTC

  2 points

  in reply to: byrnema’s comment on: Ra­tion­al­ist Role in the In­for­ma­tion Age

  NPOV has regularly been criticised as a weak point because it gravitates towards consensus rather than evaluation of arguments, so there might be value in an alternative approach. And working out the algorithms/​processes for determining RPOV would be an interesting challenge in itself.

• Alexandros 30 Apr 2009 23:22 UTC

  0 points

  in reply to: AndySimpson’s comment on: Ra­tion­al­ist Role in the In­for­ma­tion Age

  I don’t think I said anything about ‘no’ point of view. I just claimed that the current policy of wikipedia is to reach for general consensus rather than the truth-seeking standards of this community. You could probably find a few examples of topics where the beliefs held here are not mirrored in the correcponding wikipedia page. This would seem to indicate that the two communities have different reasoning mechanisms. The examples you mentioned belong in the overlap between the two, simply because consensus on these matches the rational viewpoint, despite vocal oposition. However I can think of other articles where there would be quite significant difference (think of the list of topics in the comments here for instance.

• Alexandros 1 May 2009 19:13 UTC

  8 points

  in reply to: PhilGoetz’s comment on: Open Thread: May 2009

  It seems you are conflating net neutrality (ISPs should not discriminate based on packet characteristics, including origin) with the concept that users should pay for the resources they use.

  For one thing, spammers usually use botnets so no change there, average users would bear the cost one way or another. Unless you are advocating depriorization of all email traffic, ISPs have no way other than spam filters to differentiate what counts as spam. I see no connection to the net neutrality debate, or the pay-per-usage model.

  As for porn-downloaders, I take it you mean people with high bandwidth needs, which includes all sorts of downloaders. (I really don’t see why you would emphasise porn here, even if you’re trying to evoke feelings of moral resentment, LW would seem the unlikeliest of places that this would have any efect.) I never had a problem with bandwidth usage caps, as long as they are explicit. Then carriers can compete on what they set these limits to and I can choose based on my needs. Nothing to do with net neutrality as far as I can see.

  As for my libertarian view on net neutrality: When the governments allow for true competition between ISPs, they can drop all net neutrality provisions as far as I care. But then again, in a truly competitive market, I doubt we would be having a net neutrality issue to begin with.

• Alexandros 22 May 2009 17:55 UTC

  0 points

  on: Least Sig­nal­ing Ac­tivi­ties?

  How about:

  • Laughing while alone (watching TV, reading a book, whatever)

  • Body language we utilise when talking on the phone

  • Habits(?) such as the need to walk while thinking

• Alexandros 25 May 2009 19:34 UTC

  0 points

  in reply to: lavalamp’s comment on: Sat­u­ra­tion, Distil­la­tion, Im­pro­vi­sa­tion: A Story About Pro­ce­du­ral Knowl­edge And Cookies

  I tend to view procedural knowledge as being infered from propositional knowledge. You have the map (propositional), draw the route (procedural) and then store/​transmit essentially only the route without the map (the how without all of the justufucation, although some does leak in). Mentions to automatic habit etc. can essentially be considered caching that persists even after the propositional knowledge has been discarded.

  I view Alicorn’s method as essentially 1. gathering a lot of (procedural) routes to similar goals, 2. reverse-engineering propositional knowledge from them by using (mostly) voting and 3. adding extra knowledge through experimentation and the current circumstances. This arrives at a new procedure that reaches a goal in cookie-space that is satisfying to Alicorn’s taste, constrained resources available to her, in short, an Alicorn-optimized procedure.

• Alexandros 26 May 2009 18:32 UTC

  1 point

  in reply to: Wilka’s comment on: TED Talks for Less Wrong

  something like this?

  http://​​friendfeed.com/​​lesswrong

Sin­gle Point of Mo­ral Failure

• Alexandros 6 Apr 2010 23:58 UTC

  8 points

  in reply to: Wei Dai’s comment on: Sin­gle Point of Mo­ral Failure

  That is a very good point. However, following that syllogism, assuming the massacres were indeed because of immature atheism, and knowing that there are no countries that have actually crossed the valley yet to reassure us that it is indeed finite and the next hill worthwhile, it would seem to cast a shadow of doubt on the whole project. Especially given the potential bodycount of any further experiments.

  Also, I guess you could add a world-population percentage weighing to the slaughters, but I doubt the tally would come out different …unless of course you are a bible literalist and count the Cain vs. Abel slaughter, single handedly wiping out 25% of the world’s population :)

• Alexandros 7 Apr 2010 18:36 UTC

  1 point

  in reply to: NancyLebovitz’s comment on: Sin­gle Point of Mo­ral Failure

  Thank you for your kind words. I don’t know if I’m nitpicking here, but I don’t see tribalism as a single point of moral failure, I see it as leading to group structures with a single point of moral failure.

  As for the modern name, while for the country I grew up in, Greece, religion and nationality are practically the same (the religion is tellingly named greek orthodox christianity), I use tribalism for any situation where people may put their alegiance in a group. Nations are perhaps the nearest modern equivalent to the tribe concept, but cities, neighborhoods, clans/​families, religions, football clubs, political parties, and nearly anything else you can organise people around can take over the psychological function of a tribe.

• Alexandros 7 Apr 2010 21:45 UTC

  2 points

  in reply to: Jack’s comment on: Sin­gle Point of Mo­ral Failure

  For myself, I am painfully aware of my vulnerability to nationalism. I blame it on the years of propaganda from the entire cultural context I grew up in.

• Alexandros 8 Apr 2010 6:21 UTC

  1 point

  in reply to: teageegeepea’s comment on: Sin­gle Point of Mo­ral Failure

  Hitchens very often cites the Catholic historian Paul Johnson’s, A History of Christianity, as saying that 25% of the SS were confessing Catholics, but not a single one of them was excommunicated for taking part in the Final Solution.

• Alexandros 11 Apr 2010 7:30 UTC

  0 points

  on: Meetup af­ter Hu­man­ity+ , Lon­don, Satur­day 2010-04-24?

  Unfortunately I won’t be in London for ²⁴⁄₄ but I am very much interested in a potential ⁶⁄₆ meetup.

Is Google Paper­clip­ping the Web? The Per­ils of Op­ti­miza­tion by Proxy in So­cial Systems

• Alexandros 10 May 2010 16:35 UTC

  2 points

  in reply to: Unnamed’s comment on: Is Google Paper­clip­ping the Web? The Per­ils of Op­ti­miza­tion by Proxy in So­cial Systems

  Thank you so much for the pointer. I had looked around for prior formulations of the concept but had come up short. This is the type of information that keyword search just can’t turn up. Post updated.