AstroCJ

Karma: 58

AstroCJ 21 Apr 2011 11:17 UTC
1 point
in reply to: jwhendy’s comment on: Official Less Wrong Redesign: Call for Suggestions
Do you mean something different from the “Parent” link beneath each post?

AstroCJ 21 Apr 2011 11:13 UTC
13 points
on: Official Less Wrong Redesign: Call for Suggestions
Remove DV links from a person’s “past comment” page unless viewed in context.

(After the recent comment thread dfranke sparked, I lost a large number of upvotes from my past comments, which were previously almost uniformly weakly positively ranked. I assume my previous posts had not suddenly reduced in quality, and that someone had simply decided to go through and punish me. Making people view a comment in context—one more mouse click—would make this unconstructive action less convenient and less likely.)
What links here?
- MixedNuts's comment on How can we get more and better LW contrarians? by Wei Dai (20 Apr 2012 14:39 UTC; 6 points)

AstroCJ 21 Apr 2011 11:07 UTC
6 points
on: Official Less Wrong Redesign: Call for Suggestions
Cycle comment thread background colours through at least three distinguishable colours; unobtrusive colours like pale blue, grey would be preferable.

(In the current system we alternate between two colours, and active sub-threads can have many branches; it’s difficult to follow visually. Clicking “parent” links is something of a workaround, but breaks the flow.)

(Edit: cf Nancy’s reply below)

AstroCJ 13 Apr 2011 20:31 UTC
2 points
in reply to: Zetetic’s comment on: The ideas you’re not ready to post
I have a friend currently researching this precise topic; she adores reading Twilight and simultaneously thinks that it is completely damaging for young women to be reading. The distinction she drew, as far as I understood it, was that (1) Twilight is a very, very alluring fantasy—one day an immortal, beautiful man falls permanently in love with you for the rest of time and (2) canon!Edward is terrifying when considered not through the lens of Bella. Things like him watching her sleep before they’d spoken properly; he’s not someone you want to hold up as a good candidate for romance.

(I personally have not read it, though I’ve read Alicorn’s fanfic and been told a reasonable amount of detail by friends.)

AstroCJ 13 Apr 2011 18:56 UTC
−1 points
in reply to: Perplexed’s comment on: We are not living in a simulation
You’re quite right; by paraphrasing shokwave in my rebuttal, I picked up a male pronoun. I’ve now edited the relevant comment to remove this. Thank you, on two levels.

EDIT: I didn’t actually consciously avoid it in my first post.

AstroCJ 13 Apr 2011 14:55 UTC
2 points
in reply to: Alicorn’s comment on: We are not living in a simulation
From reading the thread you linked, it seems like things have improved an awful lot; no-one has weighed in with suggestions that I nail my gender to my name to warn innocent posters that they might be about to interact with a woman. Thank you for the hug; I do need to learn to control my responses to that stimulus.

(Edit: Pft, today is a day of typos.)

AstroCJ 13 Apr 2011 14:52 UTC
−4 points
in reply to: shokwave’s comment on: We are not living in a simulation
(I appreciate that you are taking the time to engage with me politely, especially after I have previously been (rightly or wrongly) impolite due to anger.)

dfranke didn’t make a “correct” assumption, they[1] made an “unnecessary” assumption. I find it really quite surprising and disheartening that the Less Wrong community doesn’t have an interest in making a habit of avoiding these—yes, even to the point of thinking for a tenth of a second longer when using vernacular speech. Good habits, people.

There are numerous other problems here; if the community assumes that everyone in the community is male, then the community is more likely to lose female (or third-gender members) - witness both Alicorn’s and my strong irritation at being misgendered. You might chose to ignore third-gender folk, since they’re not numerous, but ignoring the [potential] presence of the entire female gender is not healthy for the individual or for the community.

If I were strictly third gender and I had complained about someone referring to me as “he/she” or similar, then I think your point here would stand; the commenter would have signalled clearly that they had made no assumptions about my gender, even if they had also signalled at the same time that they had made assumptions about gender in general. I would then be being unreasonable.

Finally, “indignation is not the correct response” because “it’s not a community norm”. Since a good number of people are avoiding gendered assumptions whilst posting here, I think indignation might well be the only way to point out to some people just how rude they are being.

[1] Edited after Perplexed pointed out that dfranke had not explicitly identified as male.

AstroCJ 13 Apr 2011 14:05 UTC
−12 points
in reply to: shokwave’s comment on: We are not living in a simulation
[blanked]

I have no desire to continue this upsetting conversation.
What links here?
- JGWeissman's comment on We are not living in a simulation by dfranke (13 Apr 2011 18:53 UTC; 5 points)

AstroCJ 13 Apr 2011 7:58 UTC
−13 points
in reply to: dfranke’s comment on: We are not living in a simulation
hiss

I downvoted a fair number of your comments because they appear to me to be extremely ill-thought out; I did not downvote your clarification above.

Do not gender me male by assumption.

Edit: DVer: I can see no reason to DV that is both “self evident” and “reasonable after proper consideration”. Please, feel free to be more constructive.

AstroCJ 13 Apr 2011 7:49 UTC
1 point
in reply to: dfranke’s comment on: We are not living in a simulation
Ok, I’ll give a longer response a go.

You seem to me to be fundamentally confused about the separation between the (at a minimum) two levels of reality being proposed. We have a simulation, and we have a real world. If you affect things in the simulation, such as replacing Venus with a planet twice the mass of Venus, then they are not the same; the gravitational field will be different and the simulation will follow a path different to the simulation with the original Venus. These two options are not “computationally the same”.

If, on the other hand, in the real world you replace your old, badly programmed Venus Simulation Chip 2000 with the new, shiny Venus Simulation Chip XD500, which does precisely the same thing as the old chip but in fewer steps so we in the real world have to sit around waiting for fewer processor cycles to end, then the simulation will follow the same path as it would have done before. Observers in the sim won’t know what Venus Chip we’re running, and they won’t know how many processor cycles it’s taking to simulate it. These two different situations are “computationally the same”.

If, in the simulation world, you replaced half of my brain with an apple, then I would be dead. If you replaced half of my brain with a computer that mimicked perfectly my old meat brain, I would be fine. If we’re in the computation world then we should point out that again, the gravitational field of my brain computer will likely be different from the gravitational field of my meat brain, and so I would label these as “not computationally the same” for clarity. If we are interested in my particular experiences of the world, given that I can’t detect gravitational fields very well, then I would label them as “computationally the same” if I am substrate independent, and “computationally different” if not.

I grew up in this universe, and my consciousness is embedded in a complex set of systems, my human brain, which is designed to make things make sense at any cost. I feel purple whenever I go outside—that’s just how I’ve always felt. Purple makes sense. This is fatal for your argument.

(Now, if one day soon my qualia jump from one state to another, now that would be something interesting.)

AstroCJ 12 Apr 2011 13:25 UTC
0 points
in reply to: dfranke’s comment on: We are not living in a simulation
If I have in front of me four apples that appear to me to be identical, but a specific two of them consistently are referred to as oranges by sources I normally trust, they are not computationally identical. If everyone perceived them as apples, I doubt I would be seen as ill.

AstroCJ 12 Apr 2011 8:37 UTC
−1 points
in reply to: dfranke’s comment on: We are not living in a simulation

they would not make sense

Proof?

AstroCJ 12 Apr 2011 8:36 UTC
−1 points
in reply to: Will_Sawin’s comment on: We are not living in a simulation
DV for being unconstructive.

AstroCJ 22 Mar 2011 15:04 UTC
4 points
in reply to: Swimmer963 (Miranda Dixon-Luinenburg) ’s comment on: What comes before rationality
I hope you didn’t take my initial comment as being aggressive or judgemental; it was a good post, well written and interesting. I hope, too, that there’s no kind of fallout.

AstroCJ 18 Mar 2011 22:09 UTC
1 point
in reply to: komponisto’s comment on: What comes before rationality
Socially penalise, nothing. Something as personal as this, it’s deeply unusual not to make it clear that you have permission; my concern is for the privacy of person under discussion.

AstroCJ 18 Mar 2011 17:33 UTC
14 points
on: What comes before rationality
I am alarmed and dismayed that no-one has raised the issue of privacy in this thread. Swimmer963, just from glancing through your comments, you’re [rot13′d description of Swimmer963 deleted].

I didn’t whizz through those to be creepy (actually I was impressed at how you seem to be consistently sensible), but if you’re going to share incredibly personal details about “a friend” who was raped, we need to know if this information has been posted with her consent. The above is very easily enough to personally identify you.

On whether or not this will be important or not: [blanked].

EDIT: Deleted precis of Swimmer963′s situation; it had served its purpose. EDIT: Deleted some personal information.

AstroCJ 19 Feb 2011 12:20 UTC
−12 points
on: Dead men tell tales: falling out of love with SIA
DV. I’ve pretty much lost patience with posts that attribute male gender to idealised agents. Destroyed my interest in rest of post.

AstroCJ 5 Feb 2011 13:43 UTC
1 point
in reply to: Snowyowl’s comment on: Rationality Quotes: February 2011
Unless...?

AstroCJ 5 Feb 2011 13:36 UTC
3 points
in reply to: Dr_Manhattan’s comment on: Rationality Quotes: February 2011
Since we do not live in the ancestral environment now, I think the quotation could be just underlining how we should viscerally know our brain is going to output sub-optimal crud given certain inputs. Upvoted original.

AstroCJ 5 Feb 2011 13:30 UTC
2 points
in reply to: XiXiDu’s comment on: On Charities and Linear Utility
Downvoted.

For games where there are multiple agents interacting, the optimal strategy will usually involve some degree of weighted randomness. If there are noncommunicating rational agents A, B, C each with (an unsplittable) $1, and charities 1 and 2 - both of which fulfil a vital function but 1 requires $2 to function and 2 requires $1 to function, I would expect the agents to donate to 1 with p = ²⁄₃.

A rational agent is aware that other rational agents exist, and will take account of their actions.